ModNation Racers (Sony; PS3, PSP; rated everyone)

ModNation Racers is a welcome addition to the fun and frantic kart-racing genre. Playing this game will conjure up memories of 1992’s Super Mario Kart, and that’s a good thing.

As a racing game, ModNation is forgiving, so it’s easy for gamers of all skill levels to pick up and play. The most fun you’ll have with ModNation is racing against friends and family. The game allows for four-player split-screen racing, and two-player split-screen in one of the on-line modes, and up to 12 players can tear up the tracks together on-line.

While racing, you’ll use weapons—both offensively and defensively—against your opponents. Weapons are collected and upgraded by picking up power-ups on the track. A missile becomes a homing missile, and if you hold on to it, the next power-up turns it into a missile that takes out all of the opponents ahead of you.

Before each race, you can tweak your driving style, too. Better drifting comes at the expense of handling, a faster top speed reduces acceleration, and vice versa. Making modifications to your kart by changing the chassis or steering wheel, though, has no impact on performance. The appearance of your vehicle is completely separate from how it drives.

And you’ll want to play around with how your vehicle looks, because ModNation is as much about racing as creating original characters, vehicles, and tracks. While characters and karts can be personalized using hundreds of different eyes, mouths, tires, and spoilers, stickers are what really imbue players’ creations with attitude. Hundreds of layers of stickers can be applied to characters and karts, and they can be combined and remixed to create other stickers.

The real achievement of ModNation, though, is how simple it is to create racetracks—it’s as simple as driving it. Want a killer chicane? Drive one. Think a spiral up a mountain and across a bridge to another peak would be cool? You can create that in a matter of moments: all you do is drive, and the game fills in the blanks, without any waiting. Even advanced editing happens on the fly.

Playing ModNation Racers is a joyful experience. You’ll come to create, and stay for the racing.