To celebrate avoiding a jail sentence yet again, we decide to buy something. But what? How about… a car! There’s a problem. We’re out of space in our garage. So, we just buy another house (my fourth, in fact). We don’t need the house itself, just the garage to keep more cars in. Cars, cars, lovely cars. Briefly, I visit the new house. We sit in the lounge, on our own, idly twirling an empty glass of water while we think about cars, watching a giant television set, which forever loops images of cars. The only signs that someone actually lives in this house are some magazines on the coffee table, which are all about cars. We pick up the phone and make a five-second call. We can’t remember what we said or to whom, but we’re pretty sure it was about cars. Friendship, food, love - none of these things matter here. There are only cars.

Being a game is an entirely secondary motivation to Test Drive Unlimited’s existence - its true raison d’être is collecting, driving, showing off and staring longingly at cars. It’s a very specific kind of porn, and it’s also quite brilliant. While something such as Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport on the consoles appeals to the same auto-fetishistic mindset, all they really allow a player to do with their archive of beautiful vehicles is race them again and again.

Test Drive Unlimited presents a dramatically broader experience: it’s about enjoying your cars as treasured personal property. So, you get a huge island to roam around at will, peppered with car showrooms and garages to feed your addiction, with long, quiet roads to take your purchases to the very limit on. But that alone wouldn’t sufficiently evoke the luxury car experience - so TDU joins, if you want it to, a persistent online world. That way, there are other people around to brag to, argue about preferred makes with, challenge to impromptu drag races and to form ultra-exclusive car clubs with. Racing, the mechanic that progresses the game and grants you untold riches, is very much only the means. The end is the cars themselves.

The racing, both online and offline, is nevertheless an essential element. And although it’s decent enough, it hasn’t received quite as much attention as the openness of the giant island. TDU is about one-third sim, two-thirds arcade racer, which makes for a cartoonier feel than the lush tropical graphics suggest. It certainly has its kicks, but it relies on you being more into the cars’ aesthetics than having meticulous mechanical knowledge.