Superbikes. The thrill of motorsport. I know all about these things, from my experience of falling asleep on a mate’s sofa as he takes great pleasure from watching a bunch of men with loud, throbbing machines between their legs, going round a circle quite quickly. You may think I'm not the right person to take SBK08 out for a spin, but - cynical though I may be about the real thing - this sort of videogame tends to generate a bit of excitement for me.



Being an officially-licensed game, all the teams from the latest Superbike season are here, as are all the big name riders. The bikes take on the same characteristics of their real life counterparts too, to some degree. So if you do pick Troy Bayliss to run through a season with, don't expect a challenge, because - after a quick couple of goes to get used to the physics of the game - the more experienced racers will find themselves charging past the other competitors from last place on the grid and winning the race by an obscene amount of time, even on the harder difficulty levels. This kind of takes away the point of the practice runs and qualifying sessions.

Between races, the pitstop is your home. Here you can hold meetings with your team (sounds more exciting than it is - a list of tips to follow when tuning your bike), fiddle around with pretty much every bike setting you want to fiddle around with (so if the idea changing your big spring thing by 5mm or replacing your brake thing for a brand new, um, brake thing to try shave off a few more milliseconds off your lap times gets you all smiley and a little moist, then this will keep you going for a while), telemetry (to check if your new bike fiddlings have made the squiggly lines different. I'm not sure what squiggly lines mean but it may be more familiar to the die hard fan) and your options screen.

Which brings us to one of the more annoying aspects of this game - the loading times. "Pop up - Accessing data, pop up - accessing data, pop up - saving data" is a trio of information boxes you will have to get used to seeing. A lot. An awful lot. Between every menu screen.

The visuals, and the menu screens for that matter, aren't anything to write home about. They do the job fine, but they just aren't as sexy as you would expect them to be on your fancy next generation console. It all looks a bit too dull.

There's also the now-compulsory racing game challenge mode, where a healthy amount of unforgiving challenges can be accessed, with the usual medal system applied depending on how well you perform. So in essence, this is a game with a few annoying traits, but it is quite fun to play (if a little too easy) and has enough tweaky bits to please the superbike tech-heads. Still, if there's a bike-shaped hole in your PS3 collection that needs to be filled, make sure you take a look at Moto GP 08 first.