My attic isn't the friendliest place in my house. There are nails poking through the aged wood, a creaky floor, numerous dark spots, and more dust than all of Nevada, but harsh conditions aside I still enjoy sifting through old boxes, in part because I never know what I'm going to find, and to also dig up happy memories from my youth, the kind that are triggered when my gaze falls upon a single object, however small. Most times I come across old toy cars from an era I have trouble remembering. Now the home for tiny spiders, these once powerful muscle machines dominated my room much like speed demons at a boardwalk along the Jersey shore. Now they lie in an old box along with the twisted and broken remnants of the tracks they once sped across. I know that I'll never dump its contents and that my Matchbox and Hot Wheels days have long since passed, but I'll always have Nadeo's TrackMania Sunrise, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

TrackMania Sunrise is essentially one big sandbox. It's an arcade-style racing game that revolves around your ability to craft the most insane tracks imaginable, and I'm not talking about installing tiny ramps or tunnels. You can do that if you prefer a safer approach, though business picks up once you toss a half pipe onto the track. Yes, a half pipe, much like the ones found in Activision's Tony Hawk series, except this one's several hundred feet high and you're maneuvering a sports car through it instead of some punk on a skateboard. It's quite a crazy concept but crazy is this series' pedigree for excellence. How much fun you have is dependant on just how nutty you are as well.

Like other racing games, Sunrise is all about time. Defeating your opponents is still somewhat important, but in order to win those all important bronze, silver, and gold medals in the game's single-player modes (and therefore advance to the next course), you're going to be concerned with shaving precious seconds off your time. This is but one reason why the game's quite a hectic affair, as every turn, jump, and straight-away must be navigated almost perfectly in order to achieve success.

The clock and the difficulty curve is actually this game's greatest flaws, because if you're a casual gamer seeking quick results TrackMania will likely send you into a raging frenzy. Having to continuously restart races or pick up at a certain check point after hitting the ENTER key can at times be quite maddening, and unless you've come to the realization that patience is indeed one of life's greatest virtues then the sun's going to set on this game long before it rises. However, these are truly minor gripes. I was up for any challenge TrackMania threw my way, and while I struggled at times it was patience that saw me through, and I just happened to have a tremendous amount of fun along the way, so much so that as I'm writing this very sentence the only thing I want to do is fire up the PC and play some more.

Nadeo really did a wonderful job with Sunrise's single-player campaign because there's several very distinct modes to play, some of which have never been seen in a racing game before. Ramps drops you onto these jump-heavy tracks and slaps you with a select amount of resets (so if you screw up you just hit ENTER). Puzzle is really sweet. You're presented with a track and you need to place some pieces onto it and then try it out to see if you can beat the computer's time, so it's all about being as efficient as possible. Lastly, Crazy Races let you test out some extremely unconventional tracks, which leads me to the next great thing about TrackMania Sunrise: its editor.

All of the cars in this game are fictitious, though you're able to paint them and add decals. However, they're not the coolest customization feature. The track editor wins that award hands down. This is where you put your very own Matchbox-like track together, a twisting, winding, ramp littered work of art designed to toss cars around like rubber balls. There is a wealth of options at your disposal, and while I found it to be a little intimidating at first, after a few minutes of experimentation I was laying down all sorts of cool set pieces. When you're done (and there's so much stuff to choose from it may take you a while) you can test out your latest creation or, if you want to take Sunrise online (and you definitely should), you can upload your track as well as download other peoples', and you can beat their best times, complete new challenges, or just race a whole bunch of drivers at once, and when I say a whole bunch, you truly have no idea. Since there's no collision detection on the cars, the game can support more than twenty racers at the same time with very little lag.

While I'm on the subject of collision detection, that's the only strange thing about TrackMania Sunrise. It works because the goal is to beat the time and not necessarily the driver next to you (though in theory you are trying to beat him or her). Still, my heart still slowly crept up my throat each and every time I got a little too close for comfort. Although the cars just pass through one another, that didn't stop me from expecting a Burnout-style wreck because that's what I've been conditioned to think, both with games and with actual driving.

Compared to other racing titles such as GT4, TrackMania will come up a bit short in the graphics department, though it's not in any way an ugly game. Nadeo's put in place a quality engine that's not only capable of supporting a ton of sweet-looking cars, but can also throw up some realistic and detailed tracks, and the fact that the action moves at such a brisk pace only adds spice to what's an excellent visual package.

The same goes for the game's audio. The sound of screeching tires and powerful engines were all well done, and the music, which is basically a collection of licensed tracks that I've never heard before fits the game perfectly. It's not the usual rock & roll or hip hop stuff that I'm used to, and it's therefore a nice change of pace from the norm.

There's nothing Nadeo can do to replace that old box in my attic, but TrackMania Sunrise provides me with all the tools necessary to recreate those cool tracks without having passers by stare at me like I'm some big freak. It's also got a wonderful online community, so you'll be playing this game long after you've put its single player modes to rest. There's not exactly a ton of racing games for the PC, but rest assured that this is without question one of best that the platform has ever hosted. If it debuted at $49.99 it'd still be worth every penny, but at its $29.99 price point it's a steal.