For speed, intelligence, community-thinking and sheer effortless design, Nadeo have pretty much trumped the online systems of every game I've ever played. Which is why (after a bizarrely hassle-free StarForce installation), I was gobsmacked, thunderstruck and 'Cor Blimey, Misterl'-ed to find myself playing online on a downloaded map within a single solitary minute of booting up TrackMania: United. Battlefield is the usual culprit - trudging through its server listings, finding decently populated servers, struggling with patches, having my daily battle with PunkBuster. With over 100,000 fan-made maps available already, you'd have to be a fool or a UKIP voter to not be excited. A community which, by the way, United is squarely intending to expand with some remarkable online capabilities - a setup not unlike the MySpace revolution.Ĭoppers, the game currency, can now be both earned in-game and spent online, allowing budding track designers and car-pimpers to sell their wares online - while all manner of online rankings and racings will be a mere click of the mouse away. So that's stadium courses, rally courses, the twists and turns of the original's desert courses and the beautiful vistas of Sunrise et al, mixed in with all the track design and car customisation so beloved by the TrackManiac collective. TrackMania United is essentially a compilation of every iteration of the game wrapped into a remarkably speedy and shiny modern-day engine. The little racing game with the great big heart that occupies more bandwidth in France than stuff about urban rioting and snails. What Have The French ever done for us? Well, there's TrackMania for one.
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