As fun as it is, there's something rather...disturbing...about Screamride. A game about racing rollercoaster cars down rails at tremendous speeds and smashing them into concrete skyscrapers isn't to be taken seriously, of course, and I'm not terribly concerned about the riders, who seem beyond thrilled for the chance to sacrifice their well-being for the chance to fling themselves into solid objects. My worry lies with the pedestrians walking around out there. There are promenades to stroll on among the office buildings and laboratories. What right-minded individual would think to hang out there--or to work there?

Well. This isn't the kind of thing you're supposed to be thinking when you play Screamride, which sets itself apart from the developer's own

The game is big on destruction. It wants you to see colossal buildings collapse into voxelized heaps.

The sandbox's downfall is not in the breadth of its toolset, but in the limitations on how you use it. Screamride suffers from a pressing need to give everything you do the same structure as its career challenges. You cannot simply build a coaster, ride it, and share it for others to do the same--not directly. Well, you can build an engineering challenge and ride your creation by testing it during and after construction, and then remove a couple of pieces of track and create a lame challenge out of it for others to complete and test. Or, you can save your coaster as a blueprint, which other players can use in their own level, which requires building a level, placing your coaster, and testing it. Or, others can download your challenge and then edit and test the coaster. But these are convoluted ways of circumventing Screamride's "Roller coasters aren't fun enough on their own!" outlook. It's frustrating to have so many tools, and so few ways of putting them to use, like an overwhelming pile of Legos that you can only use for making a boat, a car, or a house. Future downloadable content allowing for straightforward sharing, riding (not screamriding), and viewing coasters in action would be as surprising as a pile of vomit at Busch Gardens Tampa's Montu exit.

I don't wish to further belabor the issue of "what Screamride doesn't do," however, because "what Screamride does do" is a teresting subject. It turns roller coaster riding into a self-destructive blood sport in which you demolish buildings and ruin little computer people's lives for the inherent joy of it. Building up and tearing down is an age-old pleasure, and seeing sky-high structures fall like dominoes with a flick of a stick is Screamride's primary delight. I sometimes think of all those digital men and women that went plummeting to their dooms, but at least they died doing what they loved.