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Dom Robinson reviews
Sony
- Price: £14.99
- Players: 1
- Widescreen: Yes
- Online: Yes
- Multiplayer between PSPs: No
Moto GP on the Xbox was always a classy affair, while the PS2 equivalents were programmed separately and always played like a bad ZX Spectrum conversion.
This actually turns out somewhere inbetween the two versions. It’s more playable than the PS2 versions, but if you’ve got any of the Xbox titles in the series then you only need to get this PSP title if you absolutely must play it on the move, as it’s still not particularly wonderful but it’ll pass the time of day for a couple of hours.
Getting the basics out of the way, you can choose a quick arcade game, start a full season or take a look online and see if there’s any multiplayer action out there (oo-er, missus!). Then choose the difficulty level, then the year of 2005 or 2006 for the competitors featured, your choice of bike, track and the number of laps.
Like any MotoGP game, it does take some time to get used to the handling of the bikes since there’s meant to be a skill in riding them, and this is where it can fall down a bit as PSP games are meant to be very much ‘pick up and play’ for those spare time moments when you’re on a break at work or riding on the train/bus to work, not ‘pick up and figure out how to ride the bike so you can get somewhere on it’.
You don’t really get that feeling that you’re going anywhere particularly fast either. When you’re going top speed at almost 300km/h it feels like you’re just getting going, and when you slow down for a corner – so you don’t flip over – that’s apparently at a speed of around 60-70km/h, yet it looks like about 5km/h.
The graphics are a little bit rough and not massively impressive, the sound is your usual rasping engine with some dull rock-type music bashing away in the background. Very annoyingly, just before the race begins, you must then sit through a pointless list of 21 names scrolling up the screen in batches of 3, as if it really matters who you’re up against because they’ll soon dash off and leave you at the starting grid, and this bit cannot be skipped.
In fact, the starting grid is where this game should be left… oh no, now I sound like one of those dorky reviewers on Cybernet, whether it’s the high-pitched American guy who used to present America’s Top 10 after Casey Kasem left, or the stilted-voiced Catherine Fox.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.