You can click-and-drag to set or delete a strip of road and use the scroll wheel to adjust elevation. It's not as much of a change as I would have hoped for, but being able to move around, rotate, and delete pieces this way makes things much faster. But wait, there's more! The track editor now includes mouse functionality. All you need are a few burning hoops, and it becomes a circus act-in a good way. You'll race through some truly enormous set pieces, and speed has gotten a huge boost, allowing for some downright heroic leaps from one end of the map to the other. With the much wider roadways and more gradual turns, it feels a lot more like racing, and this sense of larger scope extends to the entertainingly outlandish stunts you'll be capable of. Overall, the production values make the game look and sound like a distant cousin of its predecessor. At any rate, the music doesn't feel like it's been researched and approved by a panel of youth experts. Hopefully, they'll have a running playlist going for the final version of the game. So if you find yourself playing through the same track several times, you might get tired of hearing the same song repeated over and over. Since the race tracks are short, there's only one song per track, at least in this build. Thankfully, there's no emo or other styles that sound a little trendy to my musically jaded ears. You'll get a range of musical styles, which include live bands as well as electronica, and the bands all sounded fairly familiar without sounding stale. And the music has also been completely redone. When you're surrounded by other cars, you can really hear them revving and sliding all around you. The sound in general feels a lot more spatial. And speaking of visuals, replay movie creation has been integrated into the game, and the developers showed us some music videos that fans had been able to put together and share with the TrackMania community. I trimmed back the clipping plane and got a little less ambitious with shadows and water effects, and everything ran pretty smooth on a 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro with 4xAA and 4xAF. It was a little sluggish at times, but I chalked that up to just being an early build of the game (it's not due out until late spring/early summer). You'll also have a bevy of options you can tweak to make the game run just right, while still looking pretty nice. They look a lot sharper this time around, with some fancy reflective effects and the enhanced physics I mentioned earlier. There's still three car types, by the way-sports car, roadster, and SUV. Once you're finished, the car will be saved for general use, and it looks like you can save multiple vehicles. At any rate, the shop gives a pleasingly wide range of options for the artistically inclined. You won't be able to adjust performance specs, but it's not really that type of game anyway. There's also the option to place text anywhere on the vehicle. If you don't like any of the logos available, you can make your own or download them and put them into the game. In the shop, you can select from a Photoshop-style palette of glossy and matte paints, with adjustable brush sizes and a host of logos. The presentation has been completely upgraded, with slick menus, a custom paint shop, among other things.
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