The laughably vast, mountain-high, man-made plateaus, the epic jumps from ramps that would cost millions to build, the science-breaking plunges through tiny holes in the sides of cliffs. This is about the dream of being a race driver, not the bland, cyclic, fussy reality of it.
It's a glorious sight, and it's not purely aesthetic show-offery: it's about realising the fantasy at the heart of this car game. Trackmania 2 actually does look like that. Earlier Trackmanias only seemed to look like that. In my mind, though, it looks like Trackmania 2 does: vast, sweeping landscapes, tracks composed of impossible architecture stretching to absurd heights, cars plunging to their incredibly short-lived doom in graceful metal cascades. If I went back to Trackmania United now, I suspect it'd look weirdly small and low-key. The point is that it's an evolution of what the community has made and demanded, but it's sticking closely both to the spirit of the previous games and, in a way, to our mental conception of what they are/were. Of course, things are different in all manner of ways of you could dryly list on a webpage somewhere. Be it product or be it service, Trackmania is also a state of mind, and 2 took me right back there. Initially, as a relatively casual player of Nadeo's driving fantasy games, I struggled to quite appreciate that I was playing a different Trackmania to whichever the last one I played was. While the 2 here marks a chance to start with a clean slate, the series' latter day focus on being a service rather than a self-contained entity means the confusion doesn't quite go away. If there's one factor that's bedevilled the ever-joyous Trackmania series, it's that naming conventions and cross-pollinated content has made it ever harder to work out exactly which one's which. I've spent three or four hours playing Nadeo's latest slice of science-defying racing absurdity - nowhere near enough to tell you conclusively Wot I Think, but plenty to witter about what I'm starting to think.
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