There is a school of thought that says you don’t really know what driving is until you’ve taken £175,000 worth of Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder up Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, at 165mph, on the wrong side of the road. Subscribers to this school spend a lot of time playing Midnight Club and may not be the best people to loan your car to.

Now in its fourth iteration, Midnight Club is a racing game, though the term doesn’t begin to conjure its elasticity or to suggest the extent to which the series ups the ante on the usual track-based driving simulations. It comes from Rockstar, the owner of the scandal-encrusted and supremely successful Grand Theft Auto franchise. The company’s more innocent mission, with this line, has been to create ever more immersive experiences in which the driver is handed the freedom of ever more plausible cities – in this latest case, Los Angeles, rendered in microscopic and awe-inducing detail, down, almost, to the last billboard and drain cover.

The city is the star of the game, be it in the Google Earth-style overhead shots or, at street-level, in the double-take-inducing renderings of landmarks from the Chateau Marmont to the Beverly Centre shopping mall. That said, the cars fight for a share of the attention, too. You start the game with something slightly bruised and clapped out (a 1975 Datsun, for instance, or some dodgy Dodge) and then, by performing well in illegal street races, earn money and “rep” points enabling you to upgrade to the game’s punchier motors – the glimmering Lambos and Aston Martins – while remaining permanently free to break off altogether and, obeying or ignoring red lights according to your mood, head on out to Pacific Palisades just for the heck of it.

It took car companies some persuading before they would agree to place their products in computer games involving flexible interpretations of the Highway Code and collateral destruction. The idea that someone was going to climb into, for example, a badged Ford Cobra Concept and poke it at full throttle through the front window of an accurately rendered Virgin Megastore could not have immediately struck everyone at Ford as handy for the brand. Nor, in all probability, everyone at Virgin, either.

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Eventually, though, it dawned on the car companies that this was as good a way as any of keeping their product under people’s noses and, more than that, communicating with the fanbase. (In Midnight Club, the cars are almost infinitely customisable, through to the colour of the stitching on their leather seats.)

I took to the streets for a trial run, via an Xbox 360, and quickly proved myself to be the worst driver to hit LA since Britney Spears at her most emotionally troubled. Baffled by the sensitivity of the steering, I spent more time than was really appropriate driving on the pavement and ploughing through clumps of pedestrians. Which is OK, by the way, because they all, without exception, jump miraculously clear of the wheels. (That little touch hands Midnight Club a 12-rating and the broader audience that goes with it.)

Did the cars feel accurate? I happen to have driven an actual Aston Martin V8 Vantage Roadster (perhaps the crown jewel of the range on offer here), and I can’t say the experience mapped straightforwardly on to the business of piloting one through Midnight Club’s carefully calibrated streets. The real thing was easier to control, probably, and certainly less nerve-shredding. But then I didn’t drive it (with blissful disregard for local bye-laws) along the beach at Santa Monica, nor by using a small set of plastic buttons.

And did extensive customisa-springs make an appreciable difference to the handling of the game’s Mercedes SL65? Probably, but search me. I was too busy failing to squeeze it between a waste bin and a tree on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and La Cienega. “You smell like a loser,” my racing rival had taken the trouble to tell me, over the CB radio, before racing started. Later, he added, “You’re worse than I thought, son.” It was the “son” that hurt. That and the “smell”. Still, out of the window, the sun was shining and Beverly Hills was only five minutes away by pavement. It was another lovely day in LA.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is released on Friday for Xbox tion of the virtual shocks and 360 and PS3