Trackmania Nations pimpage

After seeing Trackmania mentioned in ydnar's recent post and Trackmania Nations mentioned in Pat's recent post, I decided that I should spend some time here pimping that latter game:

First and foremost, Trackmania Nations is a FREE GAME. That's right, free. Just click on that link, download, and install. (About 272 MB for the download.) My only caveat would be to mention that the game uses a version of Starforce copy protection (Why copy protection on a free game? Hell if I know. Good question; you get bonus points.). Starforce copy protection installs its own drivers and can be a bit of a pain in some situations. I've never personally had any serious trouble, but your milage may vary.

In any case, the game is a truly excellent racing game. Imagine F-1 racing, but in a wacky arcade-y world where the cars regularly jump hundreds of feet and manage to navigate loops and use quarter-pipes better than Tony Hawk. You can play single-player (try to get the best time on a number of tracks), or multi-player (race against others online on those same tracks). For me, the best part about the game is that it includes a very user-friendly track editor that allows you to not only make your own entirely new tracks via a simple tile-based system, but also to make your own intro and replay movies with relatively sophisticated camera work and effects.

There are now over 25,000 tracks available via the Trackmania Exchange site, and a lot of them are very, very cool and far surpass anything that comes with the original game. Below are a few screenshots from my tracks, currently 14 in number, and reachable on the Exchange site by searching by my author nick, pjw. Warning--most of them are pretty difficult, especially if you're just learning the game, so don't hate me.
(/me removes pimp hat).

The first pic is a big quarterpipe transfer, the second is one of my larger tracks, just to show some scale, and the third shows some truly insane air (note the car at the upper edge of the screen). Anyway, the game is pretty much the most fun I've ever had for free that didn't involve bodily fluids of some kind, and I'd love it if more people discovered it, enjoyed it, and made some fun tracks for it. If anyone has any questions about any aspect of using the editor, I'll be happy to help.