With ModNation Racers: Road Trip, the prospective line-up of games for Sony's upcoming handheld continues to grow. As an all-new installment of the kart racing series on the PlayStation Vita, Road Trip has frantic, high-speed racing action that will also allow you to take an extensive outlet for creativity on the go. 

While fine kart racing might be the face of the package, user-generated content is where the real meat of the game is (much like LittleBigPlanet). Creation may have been simple on the PlayStation 3 installment, but it was limited by a clunky interface, no doubt a drawback of having to use a traditional controller. The PlayStation Vita and its many new features should alleviate that.

Sliding your finger across both the front-facing touch screen and rear-facing touchpad should make content creation quick (as in a matter of seconds!) and intuitive. The former allows you to draw the route for course tracks as well as "push in" the terrain to create dips, while the latter permits you to elevate the terrain to craft mountainous regions. Tapping into the Vita's other unexpected features, the appropriately named Road Trip even takes advantage of the portable's GPS functionality by offering unlockable content to traveling players who boot up the game at special locations across the globe.

With over 20 new basic tracks, a septet of color-coded and upgradeable weapons classes (earth, fire, ice, mines, bolt, sonic, and guns) and game-changing track-based weapons, the campaign mode should offer an extensive amount of entertainment to those who prefer a solo affair. As the other half of  ModNation Racers: Road Trip is, expectedly, racing, the controls have been tweaked for the better. You are less likely to come to a complete stop when you crash or are attacked, drifting is easier (and controls match those of the PlayStation 3 version thanks to the Vita's dual analog setup), and you have more opportunities to boost by relinquishing unwanted items. Thankfully, these changes mean that the frenzied action can continue at the quick clip that kart racing games should maintain.

There is potentially an endless amount of tracks to test out, as you can create a variety of them and download tracks that others have crafted; the ridiculous number of pre-existing, user-generated tracks produced for the PlayStation 3 installment should also be available for Vita users at launch, though no word on cross-platform connectivity has been confirmed. The only real limit is the world's willingness to plunge into its collective creativity and share its creations with everyone else. ModNation Racers: Road Trip looks to be a promising title as it launches in early 2012.

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