Get down and dirty with this new off road dirt biking sim - the most realistic motocross game we've ever seen. It's gripped...
Alex Burrows

Not hugely popular since the '70s, dirt biking is experiencing a renaissance at the moment. Supercross - the glitzier indoor equivalent of motocross - is currently taking the States by storm with six time US national champion Jeremy McGrath considered to be motorcycling's answer to Michael Jordan.

The games industry is desperate not to get left behind and a glut of recent PlayStation and PC off road games - Supercross 2000, Supercross Circuit, Championship Motocross with Ricky Carmichael and Edgar Torronteras' Extreme Biker - prove it's another area developers and the motocross industry alike are keen to reinvent under the 'extreme sports' banner. Extreme Biker ushered in a new era in MX PC game development, but the stunts and tricks you could perform remained outlandishly impossible on a real bike. Fun but daft. Ever seen a real motorcycle do a 360-degree barrel roll? Us neither.

Where Extreme Biker excelled in the impossible, Silkolene Honda Motocross GP is the most realistic dirt bike sim to date. Take the tabletops too quick and your rider will be thrown an impressive distance from the bike and end up headfirst in a crowd of spectators or the vegetation lining the tracks. Attempt to negotiate a hairpin bend at high speed and the bike will baulk at the 90-degree of turning circle and spill you into a berm. Gun the throttle on a grassy bank and your rear end will slip out faster than Julian Clary's in a YMCA.

If you've ever played a similar biking game you might be put off at first by the simplicity of the bike's ergonomics, but the world championship tracks vary greatly in technical ability. There's even sand instead of mud terrain in the more exotic GP locations, although the difference in dirt has little effect on the bike's performance. In fact, bizarrely enough, you still get a roost (the plume of dirt thrown up when accelerating out of a berm or landing) of mud on the sand tracks.