Monster Truck Madness 2

Ask any Sheffield Wednesday fan what Monster Trucks are and they'll tell you they're the things that Yorkshire Television considers to be more important than Wednesday winning the League Cup - because that's what they cut to show instead of the victory celebrations. Apart from in Leeds, other places where Monster Truck racing is popular include... well, any place in the States where people take the notion of familial love a mite too literally.

You know the sort of thing I'm talking about: everyone's realty good at playing the banjo, but they can talk without dribbling on their dungarees and they all have faces like semi-inflated carrier bags. For those of you who aren't familiar with Monster Truck racing, it's basically racing between normal cars which have had their engines replaced by something from an Abrams battle tank, their suspension replaced by those things the council use to ride up and down in to fix broken street lamps, and their tyres replaced by helium-filled weather balloons. Depending on the type of race you're taking part in. you either have to win in the conventional manner (by lapping faster than everyone else) or, if you're in one of the summit rumbles', by whacking everyone else about so that you're on the summit the longest. There's probably a sleeping-with-your-sister bonus in there somewhere as well. It says in the on-line manual - with typical American modesty - that "the drivers on the professional monster truck tour are the most skilled in the world". So that's presumably why you don I see Michael Schumacher, Alain Menu of Carlos Sainz in it -- they're just not good enough.

Look And Learn

There are several courses to choose from. although none of them stand out in any particular way. They've been given a range of wild-sounding names but. like the hideous Tahk' music that permeates tbe game, don't really have anything original in them. Sadly, the arenas are only available with network or modem play. Disappointingly for single players, there's no season mode -just a range of one-off races Which is a bit crap, really Looks-wtse, it's nothing to drag your mates round to wow them with, but it's alright. You can mess with the graphical detail to make everything run faster - from image quality, scenery complexity, screen resolution or choice of graphics renderer - but to get the best out of it you'll need a P200 and a 30 accelerator card; with anything slower and without the accelerator it runs like Bernard Manning in astronaut boots - and even lithe extra details like the lightning storm In the graveyard course slows things down and jerks things up.

Bouncy Things

As racing games go. it's a bit disappointing The network bashmg-about options are okay, but the racing's a bit slow-paced and dull (you never get much above 80mph), and the lack of a season option is a major oversight - who wants to compete in single races over and over again? It's competently put together, but it just doesn't do much tor me.