ModNation Racers

It's not quite complete though, so it's back to the editor to throw in some tweaks. You can change surface types, which affects traction, and you can even leave open spaces in the track layout where there are no barriers. Given the potential for abuse, United Front includes some smarty-pants logic to figure out allowable shortcuts, and even the option to specify permitted routes by hand. Then dirt, grass and flowers can be sprayed on, and there are even prop sprays for those all-important camels, mud-brick houses and palm trees (we're being shown the desert terrain theme - one of four - today). Unable to position my camel as I like, I rebel by using the d-pad to transform it into a giant camel, which the game promptly doesn't render due to an unexpected bug in the build. Foiled again.

Sochan is adamant it will be as easy to share, download and race with friends on user-generated maps as it is to build them. "It's ridiculously quick," he tells me. "We knew immediately we wanted really quick file-transfer, because if I build a track I want you and whoever else to come play it, and if you have a 20-minute download to get that track, it's just not fun. We've created one of the most innovative file-sharing systems I've ever seen. Within seconds you have the track, the assets - everything you need." Sochan also says to look out for announcements soon on how the game handles sharing and online searching.

One of the least-discussed elements of ModNation Racers, oddly, is how it handles. "We didn't want that cartoony, stuck-on-rails feel you often get with accessible [there!] racing titles," says Sochan, so what we went with was a real-world physics model on top of that." It's tough to take much away from our few minutes spent actually racing, but with hop, drift, super hop, and boost accumulated by drafting, drifting and jumping off ramps, along with a sideswipe and downward stomp move, it comes off a bit like Mario Kart (there's a surprise) with some concessions to big-boy arcade racers like your PGRs and GRIDs.

All those antisocial buttons reflect the game's love of weaponry too (there are Mario Kart-style pick-ups on track, but you can also choose not to use them and wait for an upgrade pod, graduating from a forward-firing rocket to a heat-seeker for instance), and use of weapons is Sochan's answer to the touchy subject of whether the AI rubber-bands. "Our AI guy built a very cool system that is a lot more about pack racing. If you're driving within that pack, they're trying to stop and block you, but they're not going to cheat to catch back up [if you get ahead]," he says. "But, they are now more aware and try to use weapons against you. If I'm in 12th place, the guy in 1st shouldn't be slowing down to let me catch up; if I'm in 6th place, 5th is probably worried about me and the guy in 7th is trying to catch up with me."

But what about the fact that really good racing games are remembered as fondly if not more so for specific tracks than they are for their handling and other features? Isn't there a risk that a racing game built around UGC will struggle for an identity? "You know, not at all," says Sochan. "Someone asked me earlier about egos, and it's a different thing when you're creating a user-generated content game - it isn't that you've created the greatest track ever, it's more we're excited that we've made tools that are powerful and easy to use. I hope that within the first week there are 100 tracks up there that are amazing, and have things we never anticipated." Good thing it's accessible then, really.