By Alfred Siew

IT DOESN'T seem tough to crank out a racing game these days. Put together a few fancy cars, jazz things up with rap music and a few token Asians (and Ah Beng racers) and you get a video game in the Too Fast Too Furious movie genre.

Codemasters, however, have come up with something better. Race Driver Grid is not just pretty. It can actually attract a broad range of players with both its realism and fun-to-drive races.

It is an arcade racer which lets you drive like the devil without worrying about how badly your car skids. It is also a realistic simulator that will wow most fans except diehards who demand ultra-realism on the track.

What makes the game tick are the simply beautiful graphics and sound.

Yes, sound. The realistic roar of the engines and cheering from the crowd make this more immersive than the Need

For Speed series of racing games.

The graphics are top-notch. For example, a damaged spoiler will hang off a car and only fall off after a while. Do take note that you can end up wrecking your car so badly that you have to retire from a race.

The first car I fired up - using a keyboard rather than my Logitech Rumplepad controller - crashed right into the first turn with a loud bang (not the stupid thud you hear in other games).

I had a choice to either replay the race from just before the crash or start all over again.

Yes, purists will bemoan that kind of "arcade-style" driving. But, hey, you can restart the entire race if you are gung ho enough.

How gung ho you want to be depends on how good a driver you are. You can customise that according to the "reputation" you earn from each race.

In the Grid World campaign mode, you choose from a number of assignments or races to take on as you build up your career. The tougher the race, the more money and reputation you earn - and the faster you can get your hands on new cars.

There is a nice range of cars to pick from, with American favourites like the Dodge Viper and local Ah Beng metallic rides like Nissan's Skyline - a monster to take to the track.

What you choose sometimes depends on what race you take on. There are standard street races and there are drift contests where you can choose the Toyota AE86 of Initial D fame.

There are also midnight "Touge" races down the slopes of Japan's mountains a la Initial D, so fans can live out their fantasies of the cult anime and movie.

How realistic a race can be depends on you.

You can turn on driving assists such as traction control and stability control, both real-world technologies built into cars to prevent them from skidding. If you are a genuine motorhead, do without them and assume full manual control.

That's part of the nice balance of realism and newbie-friendliness you'll find in the game.

This balance also extends to the tracks. You begin with gentle turns and graduate to tracks that will have your fingers entangled with your game controller.

This brings me to the one thing that irked me about the game. There is no out-of-box support for the popular Logitech Cordless Rumblepad and I had to download a software patch to enable it. Once I got the problem solved, however, it was mostly a happy drive for me.