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Loony - you've got to be one to ride a racing motorbike, don't you? Think about it - great wodges of finely-tuned engines and highly-stung chassis with absolutely no concessions to anything other than speed - and lots of it. No Second Prize puts you in the dangerously vibrating hot seat of a racing bike and lets you loose for a season thrashing round the bike circuits of the world.

First off you have to choose to be one of the six riders from around the globe, and a rather glamourous bunch they are too. Each one has different strengths and weaknesses but, for your first attempt, it's probably a sensible idea to choose a rider with a strong bike and body to withstand the inevitable crashes. You can opt to do a few practice runs on any of the twenty different tracks before starting the season proper, the season consisting of six laps of each course; you get three points for a win, two for second and one for third place.

The other riders compete against you, and they don't pull any punches either. Just to make things more exciting - and more frustrating - you can only save your progress eight times during the season. No Second Prize is mouse-controlled and you can adjust the sensitivity before the race - and even opt for an automatic gearbox if you're a bit of a wimp. The manual box enables you to wind the revs up more and squeeze just that bit more performance out of your machine.

It's when you actually start racing that the game shows its colours. The vector graphics are not incredibly detailed but they are very fast and the sense of speed provides buttock-clenching material when you wind the bike up to high speed. Braking into the corners, dropping a gear or two and laying the bike over sends the display whizzing around and has you leaning over in your seat. The mouse control is wonderfully responsive and, with practice, you can throw the bike around most gracefully. On the other hand, er, you might look totally incompetent - take the wrong line round a corner or at the wrong speed and you're sent careering around, on and off the track like a ping-pong ball. It can be a most frustrating experience.

A useful addition is the ability to stop the action at any time and view your performance from various camera angles. There aren't many engine-twiddling sections as there are in more involved simulations, the game concentrates on what it does best - racing.

There's one small drawback with all this blistering speed - hitting things. The tracks are fairly narrow and, apart from your opponents, there are numerous anonymous pace riders who plod round the course being overtaken by everyone - they're ripe for you to run straight into the back of.

You can sustain a certain amount of damage before you have to retire, but it's the time you lose sliding about on the grass that raises your blood pressure.

You can be leading for five straight laps then skid on the last curve and limp home in sixth place cursing. It's not a game in which you can blunder your way through at maximum throttle; it takes considerable practice to master and winning the season is going to take even the best of players quite a while.

There's no doubt that No Second Prize is a dazzling game. The racing is a fast and furious business - in fact, it's almost too fast and furious. The races are quite long and one slip-up can ruin the whole thing, leading to infuriating I-nearly-had-it-that-time situations. If you're prepared to put in the work learning how to control the bike and you can handle the frustrations of race-losing smashups, you're in for an exhilarating ride.

Fast frantic racing with brilliant smooth vectors with a real sense of involvement in the race.

Control a mite tricky at first leading to constant "crash misery" situation.