Midnight Club: Los Angeles does a phenomenal job of recreating the world-famous locale, while at the same time producing a decent enough narrative and plenty of fun, intelligent racing albeit with a somewhat inconsistent difficulty level as you progress through the game. One part Burnout Paradise, one part GTA IV, one part Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Rockstar has chosen its base gaming DNA very well indeed.

Not that loading time is exactly a major issue on either platform, but kudos once again to the developers for bringing this to the table for PS3 owners without forcing it down their throats. PlayStation 3 owners get a very welcome bonus in the form of an optional installation that occupies a mere gigabyte of space on the hard disk, copies over in a snap and reduces the load time for each level. A non-issue becomes a virtually non-existent one on 360, and I hesitate in mentioning it at all because in terms of image quality, frame-rate, gameplay - everything - Pure is indeed the supremely close conversion that Black Rock promised us. In the case of Pure, there's a minute amount of screen-tear on the pre-event countdown noticeable on the PS3 version of the game, but if it encroaches into the actual gameplay it's tucked away in the overscan area where you're really not going to see it. My painfully-selected and synchronised clips play out frame by frame, side by side, in both composite and comparison modes and that's when you really see what the differences actually are. When I compile the videos, there is a certain moment of truth once the HD versions of the movies start to render. In fact, I think it's fair to say that if every cross-platform title was as close as Pure, there'd be little point running features like this one at all. Happily, it's virtually identical on both platforms. Aside from being gloriously fun in a way that MotorStorm: Pacific Rift fails to match, Pure has all the technological advantages usually associated with a first-party game, but is of course available on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's an unbeatable combination that must surely have caused much chin-stroking and introspective musing for MotorStorm creators Evolution Studios.

Pure takes all the best from Rainbow Studios' once-great ATV Offroad Fury series and seamlessly melds it with a stunt/trick system that is shamelessly, and indeed gloriously, lifted pretty much verbatim from the legendary SSX Tricky. Black Rock Entertainment really deserves a great deal of credit for this game.

Midnight club 3 xbox one