This turbocharged car-racer illustrates the remarkable strides that mobile technology has taken of late. Here, in the palm of your hand, is pretty much all the action and excitement of a full-blown arcade game, no coins required.

Playing Raging Thunder is straightforward: Choose a car – in addition to color and style, they vary by speed, acceleration, and grip – and you’re off, screaming down a winding racetrack to the sounds of high-energy music and high-revving motors. Crossing the finish line ahead of your rivals calls for staying on course, avoiding collisions, collecting all the power-ups you can, and likewise, avoiding the grinning-skull power-downs you’ll encounter.

The action is intense and demands your full, undivided attention. In “Arcade” mode, you race against the clock, with each win giving you access to a new, more challenging track. In ”Championship”, you start with a lesser car and race to collect funny money and points with which to upgrade your car step by step. This is one game, we imagine, that few people will be done with shortly.

As familiar as it may sound, Raging Thunder offers some nifty, mobile-inspired twists on the genre, too. Away from the arcade, there are no pedals or steering wheel. So here, you control your car either by dragging a fingertip back and forth on a touch screen or, in gyro mode, by simply tilting the handset to the left and right. (We found the latter to be the most pleasing on our Nokia N97 handset.) The sensitivity of both methods is adjustable. There’s also a speed boost available and a way to bash, or tackle, competitors into the rails, with left and right fingers, respectively. (Note: The game can also be played on devices like the Nokia E72, using the cursor controls. Also the images in this post are take directly from screenshots on the E72, so rest assured the graphics are even cooler on Nokia’s touch-screen devices.)

More ambitious, Raging Thunder enables several players to race together, each on his or her own device. They can be in the same room, sharing a wireless router or, in theory, anywhere on the planet, when linked via game servers operated up in the cloud by Polarbit, the software’s developer. Raging Thunder also offers a “Time attack” mode that calls for beating the best times posted by others from all around the world. (Note: Multiplayer racing is still in beta at this time.)

This video from the developer shows Raging Thunder in action on the Nokia X6:

Raging Thunder offers a vivid and engaging driving experience, even without the kind of dedicated graphics-acceleration chips built into certain Nokia models, but there’s a small cost in terms of graphical resolution. As shown by the screenshots we’ve posted here, the game’s images are made up of fewer pixels than our screen actually has available, making them somewhat grainier than what you might be used to. But coarser images can be updated faster each second and thereby maintain a superior gaming experience. Indeed, we soon forgot about any lack of resolution as we became absorbed managing our car around tricky turns.

Other options include volume controls for music and sound effects and a choice of five languages: German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English. Raging Thunder is a game we can heartily recommend – and not just because it’s available right now at no charge from the Ovi Store. It’s a good example, we imagine, of the kinds of fast-paced games we’ll be seeing much more of in the future.