NEW Test Drive Unlimited Trailer: Massively Multiplayer Racing on the PSP

A new trailer for Atari’s Test Drive Unlimited has just been released, and it looks promising. When the game was hit the streets last year for the Xbox 360, it boasted the world’s first MMO racing experience, allowing Xbox Live users to meet up and race each other over a virtual reproduction of Oahu (without any of the pesky pedestrians or traffic). Multiplayer match-ups worked well on paper, but players complained that they could not locate friends who had the misfortune of being located on different servers, making organized meetings a pain. Nevertheless, Test Drive Unlimited took the concept of free-roam racing to a whole new level. Incredibly, the PSP version includes all of the massively multiplayer functionality of the console version, in a tight little handeld package. Even though the PSP is saturated with quality racing titles, this game could be one of the year’s best.

The trailer shows off some of the impressive car models in the game. It looks like the developers did not cut too many corners graphically, since the trailer managed to have us salivating over the Lotus Elise. Control during races still looks a little bit “floaty” from the clips shown in the video. Perhaps someone who has played the Xbox version can comment on the car controls, since this is the most important part of any racing simulation and could make or break the game.