GameStop: Buy Grooverider: Slot Car Thunder, Encore Software, Game Cube, Find release dates, customer reviews, previews and screenshots.

Remember slot car racing? Toy cars set atop electromagnetic tracks; you pull on a grip control and watch them go.

Most of us played with these car-and-track combinations growing up. Eventually, however, there came a time to put boyhood games to rest and focus on -- err, videogames. It's no doubt with this in mind that developer and publisher Software created, a budget-priced racer based on the popular hobby, for GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Grooverider is in many ways a successful videogame clone of the real hobby. It sports a wide variety of cars and tracks, several of them recognizable to anybody who has played with slot cars before. It later offers up customizable course options.

But in its attempt to remain true to real slot car racing it fails. It lacks control freedom. Cars cannot be steered, only made to switch tracks, and this is a big frustration. The title is also smeared by a number of important technical shortcomings. • Budget priced racer • Speed slot cars over unpredictable tracks • Features 24 different tracks • Race 20 unique vehicles • Three difficulty levels • Four-player split-screen Gameplay Grooverider: Slot Car Thunder is about as simplistic and simultaneously arcade-like as videogame racers come.

Gamers control a slot car of their choice -- at the beginning of the title only 1920s British vehicles are available but as players progress they will unlock others like the American muscle cars -- and race them around winding, unpredictable stunt-like courses. There are computer-controlled competitors to deal with, obstacles to avoid, sharp twists to consider and jumps to navigate and all of them keep the action mildly entertaining for a short while, but it isn't long before some of the title's many frustrations weigh the experience down. We understand that the development team wanted to stay true to the real-life nature of the hobby, but some of the design choices made here do not translate triumphantly to the digital arena. Slot Car Thunder is flimsy on control. Players accelerate and decelerate with the analog stick, a play style that might have proved more interesting if all other steering options were not disappointingly relegated to the shoulder buttons.

Racers do not steer, cannot really turn or maneuver their cars. Instead, one must tap the shoulder buttons to strafe their vehicle right or left on the track.

This is an entertaining enough procedure when racing at the local hobby store, but it doesn't make for a very exciting videogame experience. There are unfortunately other gameplay drawbacks. Competitor car artificial intelligence can behave unfairly, slamming players' rides into obstacles and halting their progress. The camera system, meanwhile, can become cumbersome depending on the design off the track. All too often we could not see a barrier just ahead of our car until it was to late to avoid. On top of everything else, the physics system in place is unpredictable, at one moment seeming to magnetize cars to the track and in the next flinging them off the rails with only a slight increase in speed. Hardcore Slot Car fans may be more forgiving of these inadequacies than us.

The game does at least feature a good number of tracks, more than 24 in all, and a healthy helping of unique race cars, not to mention a multiplayer mode. These extras would have gone a lot further if the too-important gameplay element was not so unrefined.

Racing fanatics may find some small amount of entertainment here. We continued to play through the game's tracks despite our issues with the control and camera and occasionally found ourselves slightly amused. Certainly at the price tag there's worse on the market. But there are also far better racers to be found and in similar price ranges and gamers shouldn't be made to settle just because of a cheaper cost. Graphics Unimpressive. Game Biko 3.

Poor, in some cases. Grooverider's cars and tracks are constructed using a decidedly low amount of polygons and as a result neither appear to be overly defined or graphically detailed. The texture work is blurred and repetitive. The game is saturated by grays. The particle system is lacking. The lighting effects are underdeveloped. The camera gets in the way.

In fact, there are no real extra bells and whistles. Despite all of this, the title's framerate chugs on a regular basis. Sound The word 'meh' comes to mind. Ho-hum engine and screech noises, drowned out techno music and very little else.