The rider and bike are dynamically modelled separately to increase realism as you ride and, probably, to make the prangs better. We’ve come a long way from the stylised get-offs of Road Rash, even if you do still get to your feet, Terminator-like, after the most horrific squishes.

Superbike World Championship does other things brilliantly too. The other riders’ AI is good - the sods try to trick you, and sometimes make side-splitting mistakes. Side-splitting for them that is, as they bounce into the Armco.

You can also play with the settings of your bike. It’s not quite F1GP2, but fiddling with the tyres and a million suspension settings must be someone’s cup of Darjeeling. And you can race against your mates, multiplayer stylee. This entails one of you waiting while the others spin in fruitless circles on the grass before falling over and being given another chance.

So is there a problem? Well, just the one, and it’s no biggie. The trouble is, no bike game has ever really captured the feeling of pushing your machine and your ability to the ragged edge. Here, for example, it’s down to speed. Too fast and you run wide, too slow and you cut the corner.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in sim or arcade mode, or which difficulty setting you choose, the feeling is that you’re either banking or you’re upright and the path you take is inflexible. It’s all well-modelled, but feels well-modelled at the expense of some realism in gameplay. Yeah, yeah. We’re asking the impossible. Let’s leave it.

Min specs: P166, 32 Mb RAM