There was some solid competition for the award this year, but Colin McRae Rally 2005 trumped several other excellent N-Gage titles because it was the most well-rounded, easily accessible game to hit the market.

The console McRaes are notable for their realistic driving physics and myriad tuning options, which make the seemingly mundane task of driving a rally car on a loose track into a discipline that's only a level or two below obtaining an actual automotive engineering degree. But the N-Gage version doesn't just jam all these technical and gameplay minutiae into an MMC and call it a game--it does so in a way that makes no concessions or sacrifices whatsoever in either presentation or gameplay. Throughout its many far-flung driving environments and tracks, this game consistently maintains a level of graphical polish and acuity that would make most driving titles for the original PlayStation blush. All the car models look absolutely authentic, even down to their color schemes, and their fully destructible models are quite unprecedented on the N-Gage. The first time you see your right rear wheel well buckle and then actually have trouble cornering as a result, your jaw will drop. Most impressively, you'll never experience any significant slowdown during play. Colin McRae Rally 2005 cruises at a very consistent 25fps, in spite of its advanced graphics, which is doubly meritorious for an N-Gage game.

Colin McRae Rally 2005 is also tremendously deep for a driving game. In fact, it may very well be one of the most involving games on the N-Gage in any genre. For one thing, getting the accelerate-and-drift gameplay right in general is a challenging, rewarding task. From there, learning to drive each of the available rally cars is a nuanced process, because each has appreciably different characteristics--and you'd better figure out how to tune and repair each car while you're at it, because constant tinkering based on track conditions and the like is essential to your margin of victory. There are also gameplay options galore, from different types of race contests to stellar Bluetooth multiplayer.

Yes, Colin McRae Rally 2005 is a port, but the process was undertaken with such painstaking skill that the resulting product conforms perfectly to the N-Gage's abilities--so perfectly, in fact, that the game doesn't really even look or feel like an N-Gage game. All in all, Colin McRae Rally 2005 is the best game for the N-Gage we've seen this year, and it is certainly one of the best driving games available for any portable gaming machine right now.