Many years ago I got a Playstation 1 and had my first taste of "proper" 3D gaming. One of my favourite titles was "Destruction Derby" which, as well as boasting some rather good in game music, allowed me to drive around and smash bits off other cars. Ever since then I've enjoyed driving with complete madness. Burnout 3 was another game where you were encouraged to cause carnage and mayhem at the expense of other players and Flatout takes it even further. You might even say it gets personal, in that your body can be flung out of the car and under the axles of the six following ones. In fact there are even some mini games where the object is to fling your hapless driver as far or high as possible. Which is probably not very nice. But great fun.

The driving itself is something of an experience as well. One of the things about other driving games that upset me was the way that you had "invisible walls" all round you and that some objects could be a lot more solid than they should ought. Your speeding beast of a car could quite often be brought to a shuddering halt by a sapling in the way, and the objects in the scenery were not inclined to move when you hit them. Not so in Flatout. The environments are very interactive and great fun just to crash into. You can bounce off things, smash things to pieces, knock them into the path of other cars and generally do all the things that you could really do in a stock car shortly before you were killed by the impact. This is the kind of stuff that Newton invented the laws of physics for.

The handling of the car is very soggy to start with, having a tendancy to oversteer like crazy and bonce around like a mad thing. Once you get some cash and spend it on suspension and tyre upgrades things get a lot more positive though and you can set about climbing the leagues. I've only played it for a couple of hours so far. But I think this is the start of quite a long term relationship.

If you like driving games and want something insane to try your hand at, Flatout might just be up your street.

Oh, and another clue for the mystery object. It was made by Sony around thirty years ago. And the three different widths on the bottom bit are significant.