eople, myself included, remember the Rush games fondly. Hopefully, after some serious psychiatric therapy, I’ll be able to do that again without calling to mind this most unfortunate outing. I see where the design plan was going with the mix of import tuner standbys, Burnout crashes, and sprinkling of old Rush title flavor this game has going on, but there isn’t a single part done right.

If I were the owner of an aging but still memorable racing franchise I could understand the allure of bringing it up to date. Open-city street racing titles are flying off of the shelves. MTV and its Pimp My Ride tuner’s West Coast Customs are tops in the 18 to 25 male demo. "Rush should really do that," they say. Then MTV signs on to do L.A. Rush’s soundtrack and the WCC shop is the only place in town to get your ride customized.

To my mind, feel free to make Rush do all of those things, but at least ape accurately from the franchises in question. Don’t make me re-race uninteresting mini circuits just to get enough cash to do something else that could potentially be fun. Don’t have 15-second impact animations that look like butt after every fender bender (In fairness, you can speed up the crashes, but they still happen entirely too often). Avoid randomized traffic, unless you can do it well (which it isn’t here). I’d also like a little more control on how my garage shapes up early on. Oh, and I’d want a touch more control when driving said cars. Arcade-style physics I can deal with, but this takes it way out of line.

And yet, even with all of this hating going on, I would be remiss to not point out that there are some amazingly cool moments in this game. Cruise mode (i.e. maintaining a certain speed without crashing wins the race) is one of the best things ever. If you get rolling, it can put racers in that zen-like trance that’s the goal of players the world ‘round. Large-scale destruction is also a sweet idea, although I wish the game made a bigger deal about it.

Instead, I’m jostling through the very large cityscape that the team has created, wishing that the whole experience were more compact and a little prettier. I get the distinct impression that more was bitten off than could have been chewed, and I wish some miles of road had been cut in favor of graphics that don’t look like early prototype renders from four years ago.

Maybe someone out there can look at L.A. Rush and say that it’s unintentionally bad, and therefore good…like a A Sound Of Thunder. But the overriding feeling during my entire playtime was, "Oh no. I have to do another race." And that’s not so-bad-it’s-good; that’s just not fun.