Joe Danger

Individual elements are also hewn to their simplest and most effective - the trick system, for instance, is accessed by tapping combinations of the two bumpers and holding them until just before landing. There are various advanced tricks to learn to help you make faster progress, too, like double-jumping off of springs, and using the boost button like a jetpack to keep yourself in the air, but figuring out and applying each is a case of logic and intuition rather than superhuman skill.

Level design is never quite so extraordinary or iconic as that of Trials HD, but there are some great courses to run, and you can also design your own. In Sandbox mode you drive around as normal, but by pressing triangle you pause the game and get to add stuff, rotate it, stack it and start playing again. Not sure where to position your landing zone? Fire yourself off the ramp and wait until you're about to hit the ground, then hit the edit button and slap something down. It's that simple.

There's also a two-player split-screen mode with its own suite of levels, and a few other distractions peppered around the Career mode, like ten-pin bowling levels and races against rival daredevils, whose relative positions are indicated by a little bar along the bottom of the screen as you smash out tricks to boost and fend them off.

Joe Danger also happens to be a lovely place to play. It's possibly the cheeriest game of the year, full of bright, retro graphics, music and sound effects. Grandstands bounce, blimps float through deep blue skies, giant blocks smile randomly in the background and even the bumpers designed to halt your progress smirk mischievously, while hand organs blast merrily over the top of everything.

More could have been done in a few areas. There are friends and global leaderboards, but they need more browsing options and faster navigation, and it's impossible to save or upload replays, which is a real shame. Joe Danger may not be Trials HD - it's precise, but in very different ways - but it's easy to imagine a cloud of replays to learn from and compete with would have had a similarly sustaining effect.

Expect hundreds of videos to turn up on YouTube in the next few days all the same though, because Joe Danger invites the same kind of obsessive, perfectionist approach as Trials HD once it makes its mark, and even if your score for the first level is closer to 20 million than 280 million the rewards can be just as thrilling, and your antics just as hilarious and memorable.

The game's four developers apparently had different takes on what they wanted from their cute, fast-moving stunt game when they began to make Joe Danger, and it does show, but only in a good way. Despite traces of everything from Excitebike and Trials to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Sonic the Hedgehog, the result is accomplished and coherent. You can play Joe Danger in a number of ways, but more importantly each is worth playing, whichever way a given level happens to be dragging you.