We already have a pretty good idea how the single-player side of the latest incarnation of the Colin McRae series is going to pan out, but one big piece of the puzzle seemed to be missing--competitive online action. Instead of having you race alongside other people, DiRT compares race times, albeit race times from others driving the same bit of road as you, at the same time.

　　While reaction to this decision has been mixed, Codemasters is still confident that it will provide a compelling, exciting experience, and so we jumped into a specially arranged preview test session to learn more.

　　The basic options for playing on Xbox Live are similar to those in many other competitive games. You can jump straight into the racing options or check out the online leaderboards, which detail the fastest lap or stage times, as well as global rankings. Your overall position in the latter list is dictated by the TrueSkill method that many Xbox Live games use, which gives you an overall number based on how you perform against others, relative to your own score.

　　Speeding along tight stages, trying to beat the clock and a host of other racers' live times...it ain't easy.

　　To affect that rating you need to take part in ranked events, although you can choose to take part in unranked player races and private sessions as well. Once you decide on your settings, you're placed into a session which can include up to 99 other racers, and voting then takes place on which track will be contested. A 60-second countdown begins, and at the end of that time the most popular venue is selected and the race environment begins to load. Voting is simply a case of choosing one venue from a selection of six or seven, or if nobody votes then a track will be selected at random. In the series of games that we played there seemed to be a fairly consistent selection of tracks, although at this point we're not sure exactly how many of the game's tracks can feed into that vote and how often they vary.

　　From there it's straight into the race and the countdown to the green light. You're racing point-to-point stages, rather than circuits, and like in the offline game, this is done without anybody else around you--not even ghost cars. The progress of the other drivers can be followed in two ways. In the top right of the screen is your position indicator, which displays who is leading and which drivers are directly ahead of or behind your time. Then, running down the left-hand side is a progress indicator showing you how far through the stage you are. Your car is represented by a big triangle, while other drivers are represented by small triangle icons. As you pass the split timing points, you'll also get an indication of how far behind the leader you are.

　　While this information sounds a little sterile in comparison to the bump and grind of side-by-side action, it can be pretty intense. The nature of these stages means that you'll need maximum concentration to do well, and taking your eye from the road even for a second, to check out your opposition's progress for instance, is a dangerous temptation. If the race is close, the pressure to get that little bit extra out of your car is high, and because you can't see the actual ontrack line that anybody else is taking, you don't know with any certainty how fast they're going or whether or not they might be about to crash. A big positive side effect to this system was that, in our test at least, there was no lag or loss of frame rate, which is important for a style of racing that demands such a high level of precision.

　　Once the race leader has completed the stage, everybody else has around 30 seconds to get to the finish line, and then it's back to the session's lobby. Points are awarded based on how many other drivers you beat, and they're carried over from race to race. Though the points don't mean anything outside of that specific lobby, and once you leave your tally is erased, it's a pretty good way of keeping track of everybody's performance over a series of events.

　　After the results are in, you can use a little text chat add-on in that lobby, which lets you select, by angling the left analogue stick, one of eight initial message subject headings, such as "hello," "voting," or "happy," and then select a phrase relating to that heading. It's a basic method of communication, but it's quick and easy to use and should enable brief gloating, or despair, in a more manageable way than 100 voices all competing for attention at once.

　　How this system will stand up to the stresses of a larger number of players than took part in our test remains to be seen, but for now it's an interesting alternative to what most people might have expected to see. We'll bring you a full review of DiRT nearer release time.