Placing the camera behind the bike may make good results easier to achieve, with its line-of-sight advantages, but it’s the on board cockpit view that offers the full experience. You can race from one of several different points of view. By the time you hit Champion mode, you’ll be lucky to keep them in sight for a whole lap. Things get really interesting when you set the other riders to anything above Medium difficulty, which is when they start behaving like real racers. It may sound daunting to biking virgins or gaming noobs, but MotoGP 08 manages to be playable to both novices and TT veterans alike by offering a genuinely worthwhile range of difficulty options in terms of physics, handling and how well your computer controlled rivals race. Rider weight distribution is disappointing though, and it’s nigh on impossible to wheelie or stoppie, which feels alien after the stunt-driven antics of earlier instalments in the series.

You actually feel the mass and momentum of the bike as it banks through the corners, the horizon shifting with your lean angle, the rear tyre braking away as you get on the gas too hard. This is the first console game that has managed to capture the sensations of riding a motorcycle, let alone racing one. The Milan based programmers have been busy producing what may be the most enjoyable realistic motorbike game ever to have been released on a console. But we needn’t have worried, because things have moved on a long way since then. We were a bit concerned when we found out that this engine was forming the backbone of the code in MotoGP 08. Milestone developed last year’s underwhelming SBK 08, which promised a lot, but ultimately failed to deliver either gameplay or graphics. Time for a reset, then, in the form of both a new publisher and developer.

The MotoGP series of videogames started out as an impressive franchise that degenerated into increasingly arcade style outings, without a single impressive outing on the so-called ‘next generation’ consoles of Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.

Moto gp 08 tracks