GRAAAARGGHH! NYYYAAAAGGGG! UNFAAAAIIIIR! GAAAAAAAH! RAAOOOOOOGGGGHHHHNNNN! WHHHYYYYY?  They’re just some of the noises you’ll make when your head smashes into a ramp at 120mph and you land on an explosive barrel that hurtles your broken self a hundred feet into the air for the twelvety-millionth time in an hour.

Then you’ll pick yourself up and start all over again. One broken controller and a serious temptation to nut the TV later, you realise you’re hopelessly, crushingly addicted and your life is over until you’ve got a gold medal on EVERY TRACK DAMN IT.

Trials. How aptly thou art named. Taking the form of a side-scrolling trials-bike simulator (fans of the 1980s-tastic Kikstart television series and game will know instinctively how this plays), you’re hurled into a race against the rest of the world (or at least your friends list) on the most fiendish, evil, sinfully frustrating tracks known to man.

To begin, it seems incredibly simplistic - right trigger to accelerate, left trigger to brake and left stick to shift your weight forwards or backwards. That’s it. A breath of fresh air in a world where even simple arcade games regularly use every face button on your controller. So you fire up the first tutorial track on the easiest setting, just to get yourself used to things.

You accelerate, flip the bike over and land on your head. Bother. Try again. A half-dozen attempts later, you feel like you’ve got the measure of the control system and hit your first few tracks - this is where the game’s genius really comes in, because nothing prepares you for the speed, skill and delicacy you need to complete the tracks.

Yes, each track is littered with checkpoints and you can start from the last checkpoint you crossed (effectively giving you infinite continues), but the skill set you need to complete the majority of the tracks is really quite high. Balance, planning, logic and an understanding of basic physics are essential. This makes it infinitely addictive, as you gradually conquer each track, getting further and further, brain aching, thumbs sore, eyes bleary.

Of course, it’s not that simple, firstly you’re competing against everyone on your friends list - a chart at the top of the screen constantly showing you exactly how far behind or in front of your mates you are. This is a very clever touch - instantly granting the game a sense of community and competition. Chuck in the fact that you get a ‘fault’ each time you restart from a checkpoint (gold awards often require you to finish the track with no faults, or occasionally just a handful of faults) and the ‘one more go, I can do this damn it’ feeling is only increased.

Variety is certainly not an issue either; plenty of different bikes (including some very silly ones), dozens of tracks featuring loops, leaps, hills, drops, explosions, flips, crazy speed, see saws and various physics puzzles help keep everything alive and fresh. Then too there are many daft little mini-games that are included (leap through flaming hoops, crash and break as many bones as possible etc.), and I haven’t even mentioned the level-editor yet, which allows you to create your own insane hell-spawn levels of death and mayhem and inflict them upon your friends, basically giving the game infinite potential for giving you an aneurysm. Which is nice.

It’s great to get a properly old school Arcade game for once: unforgivingly difficult yet rewarding. I can’t remember the last time I went through rage, joy, disappointment, shock, more rage, hilarity, elation, yet more rage and excitement in a two minute time space. Probably never. Certainly not with other infamous frustrate-a-thons such as Ikaruga, which just threw a brick wall up at level 3 and refused to allow me any further no matter how many times I tackled the bloomin’ thing. Trials is a very different beast - you never feel it’s too hard, you always feel you can get that little bit further. And you do, inch by inch, finally feeling like a true hero when you eventually get over that annoying pile of logs. Of course, this is usually followed by a sinking feeling as a wall of concrete and fire looms, but still…

Add to this the facts that, at just 1200 points (or about a tenner), it offers fantastic value and it looks really good – much better than the vast majority of Live Arcade games actually – and you have a package that is pretty much complete. This isn’t just one of the best games available on Live Arcade, this is one of the best games of this year and puts many a full price release to shame with its wealth of gameplay and superb level of polish. Basically, what I’m trying to say is this: BUY TRIALS HD, PEOPLE.

Now, I’m off to get my last few golds. Or kick my TV in.

Probably the latter.

Jim