Another year, another MotoGP game. Most of you have probably switched off already, certainly everyone here at GV Towers seems to have, although that may have been my attempt to explain last night’s Eastenders. My Bianca impression apparently needs some work.

So let’s concentrate on the game and the first reason to get excited about the 08 iteration of the (ugh) franchise - a change of developer and publisher. We suspect we were not alone in getting rather tired of the Climax programmed offerings we’ve been fed through THQ in recent years. The AI was shoddy, the career mode (such as it was) was badly thought out and the less said about the “EXTREME” bikes and fictional “Street” tracks the better. This is MotoGP, not “The fast and the furious”. At no point should anyone say “Yo”.

The licence is now in the hands of Capcom, who on the face of it are not the most obvious choice. They have though delegated the development duties to the people at Milestone who have been writing bike games for 8 years and racing games for much, much longer (Anyone remember “Screamer” on PC?). Getting in a team with a clear passion plays dividends immediately.

For a start the extreme mode has been given a long overdue boot and in its place have come in the 125cc and 250cc classes that follow the top class championship to all but 1 of its races. In reality these classes allow up and coming riders to race the same tracks as the big boys on slightly slower, slightly easier bikes.   It’s the route that Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa took and now, thanks to the expanded and effective career mode you’ll be doing exactly the same.

You start off in the 125cc class, riding for one of the low end teams and just as in real life you’ll have a slower, older customer bike. You’ll be lucky to qualify anywhere other than the back row and you’ll be fighting tooth and nail for every point.

And it’s those points you’ll need because over the course of your career the jobs that you get offered are based simply on the number of points you’ve acquired during your career with the requirements ranging from 60 odd just to move off the bottom of the 125cc class to a full 1100 to find out if you’re a Casey Stoner or a Marco Melandri on board the fearsome Ducati Desmosedici.

It’s an interesting way to do a career mode, normally games with this kind of set up hide their criteria from you and you only find out at the end of the season who is prepared to offer you a job. While that would be more realistic, it’s nice to have a level of transparency and MotoGP 08 is constantly keeping you updated of what’s available at the end of the season. The tension we had going into the last round needing 4 points to get the job we wanted was immense and the disappointment in utterly blowing it at a wet Valencia was palpable.