Test Drive: Eve of Destruction [PS2]

Considering the things that make video games fun -- competition, speed, and both intentional and unintentional violence -- you'd think that A-grade smash-racing games would be a basic given right. But by any measure, there aren't enough. Thankfully, Test Drive: Eve of Destruction definitely tips the scales back in the right direction with immensely playable, not-too-serious action.

The heart of the game, at least for solo play, is the career mode that spans a generic rural county and its various points of interest. These include paved but narrow backroads, race-tracks both professional and sloppy, dusty short-cuts, destruction-derby "bowls," quarry/construction sites with radical changes in topography, a junkyard, a low-rent garage, and a roadside diner where the elite meet to beat all the other would-be demolition derby stars.

Starting out from a home base trailer (with less than a hundred bucks and only one iffy, sub-compact beater), players must earn money and local prestige by competing in various demolition-racing events across the county. These are the aptly-named "Eves of Destruction." Each Eve is itself made up of a succession of individual race types and while your initial tiny car is reliable enough to take some of the early ones, you'll soon be obliged to use race winnings to start buying and upgrading a small fleet of new vehicles.

Every player will find their favorite mix of the basic car attributes (speed, handling, and durability), but it's probably best not to get too attached to any one. Every available vehicle -- even the "new" ones just acquired from the local wrecking yard -- is already pretty messed-up, at least from a visual standpoint. It's just as well, because the game's hefty selection of race types revolves around accidents, and it's accepted logic that you'll go through many cars in the course of the game.

While vehicles can be repaired between and even during Eves (for a steeper price, of course), they gradually accumulate percentages of irreparable damage. As for the vehicles you're especially loathe to part with, it's possible to prolong their racing career somewhat with upgrades at the local garage, but some races just aren't possible to finish when starting with a 70 percent ruined car.

Whether you're up for the full-on career mode, or just some quick single or multiplayer action, there are lots of race types available, some of them quite odd. Variants include: the figure-eight and figure-eight jump races; the self-explanatory no rules race; the gauntlet, wherein players must drive an ungainly hearse, surviving laps with ramming cars lying in wait; the conventional destruction derby; the whip-around race, where cars must reverse direction every half-lap; a dangerous point-to-point race, and others.

One of the nastier ones is the suicide race, where two equally matched teams of cars race circuits in opposite directions simultaneously. Just as fun but less explicable are the trailer and chain races, where cars haul an oversized trailer, the excess weight swinging wildly behind and causing problems when packs of racers converge. And for sheer weirdness, nothing beats the soccer variant -- use your vehicles to push a huge 15-foot soccer ball around! GOOOAAAALL!

All these unusual options are fine and dandy, but they'd mean nothing if the game's basic mechanics weren't fun... and we're here to say, they rock. The physics are violently goofy, and while cars handle with an illusion of dirt-drifting "realism," they're also able to withstand ludicrous amounts of punishment, running reliably right up to the point where they suddenly, um, don't. We've come to cherish this game's nice handling formula.

For a game with such a rowdy approach, it's got some surprisingly stuffy requirements to stay on the track proper -- wander off for more than a second or so, and you'll immediately get a five-second countdown to return; even modest corner-cutting can result in drivers getting plopped back on the track

Eve of Destruction bears the gift of immense replayability, lending itself to quick, low-commitment gameplay sessions. If you've almost given up on console demolition racers for being too floaty, predictable, or wimpy, stick a pinch of Eve between your cheek and gum.