Driving through the rain-drenched streets of Shanghai in an Aston Martin DB4 at breakneck speeds, with the neon signs of shops blurring as you pass by, is one of the great thrills in life - even if it is only virtual.
Video game development has made tremendous graphical strides in the last four decades and nowhere is this more pronounced than in driving simulations.
In the 1970s a driving game was a simple mix of black and white pixels that were manoeuvred between two moving lines to represent the road's edge.
One of the first such games, Night Driver, had a plastic representation of the car that was laid under the screen of the arcade machine.
Games such as Project Gotham Racing 4, Ferrari Challenge and Gran Turismo 5 offer photo-real cars with simulated handling physics, being thrown about in high-definition worlds, which often recreate real cities in astonishing detail.
More from the BBC
In Pictures - the evolution of racing games