Ok, I'm officially taking the torch from McWhertor as Kotaku's resident Motorstorm fanboy.
I just got my preview copy of the game for the Playstation 3 debug and it kicks major ass. It's like what Excite Truck could have been, but with better graphics.
The version I have doesn't let me play online, so I have yet to see what the game's performance will be like over the network. But in house, in house it's amazing.
Part of the reason I think I'm so blown away by the game is because I never bought into the early hype and so I didn't ride that emotional roller coaster brought on by watching those early vids that ended up being nothing like the finished product.
While the game's graphics are simply amazing, it doesn't do things like show detailed mud splashing across the hood of your car in the middle of a race, or detailed, tread-specific ruts forming in the road.
What it does do is drop you into a highly-stylized version of off-road racing and slap you in vehicles that explode into a detailed array of fire, smoke and parts. At times, it felt like the car I was driving was made of porcelain, but that's half the fun.
And the ruts do form along the track, there's even mud, but it appears to be a bit more area specific than tire specific. In other words you leave your mark on the world, but you never really see your tires leaving specific impressions in the mud.
The good news is that over time that muddied up road because harder to navigate and actually affects play. The same is true with other parts of the course on various maps that you can change. For instance, in one map I actually knocked down a ramp and it stayed down.
While the graphics are a big chunk of what make this game so much fun to play, that doesn't mean the game doesn't offer up plenty of fun in the way of game mechanics.
The idea is that you work your way through various off-road courses in an assortment of vehicles trying to win the race. The races earn you points which will open some new courses and vehicles, others are opened by doing specific things like getting first place in every race on a particular course.
The game lets you race motorcycles, ATV, trucks, buggies, stock cars and big rigs. Each type of vehicle behaves very differently. For instance, the big rigs are best in the mud, while the motorcycles are great at hopping from plateau to plateau.
Controls are fairly basic, you steer either with motion control or with a thumbstick, you've got gas, brake, a handbrake and turbo, which can overheat and cause your vehicle to explode.
The courses are truly open, which means each race has a lot of different options for how you complete it. You can stay low in the mud, try jumping across huge drops, drift along side a precarious drop. It's this openness that really makes Motorstorm most fun, that and the heft of the vehicles. They all truly have a unique feel to them. The motorcycles can zip around corners, big rigs wallow through the mud and slowly crank through a turn, stock cars tend to bounce themselves to pieces.
The game is a blast. I played through about a quarter of the single player races last night and could have kept playing if I didn't have more to do.
I think Motorstorm could easily be the Playstation 3's first truly break-out hit. Brian Crecente
Update For those of you who somehow misunderstood "preview copy of game from Playstation 3" for kiosk demo, this is in fact a nearly finished copy of the game. Perhaps gold, though Sony's press material included with the game doesn't say.
:rofl: 
