Some rough off-screen snaps of a game purporting to be MotorStorm 3 have appeared on the net, showing an apparent move in setting to an apocalyptic, collapsing city for the off-road racing series.

French site PS3 Gen (via Kotaku) has the pics, which it calls "stolen".

A title screen shows the MotorStorm 3 logo over a cracked and burning skyline, identified as San Francisco by a sign in the foreground.

A tuned road car is shown racing along streets as skyscrapers collapse ahead of it in scenes strongly reminiscent of Disney's recent action racer Split/Second. Another shot has pedestrians running across the path of the speeding car, and what might be a helicopter on fire.

If genuine, the screens would represent a dramatic change for Sony and Evolution Studios' racing series, which has so far set its anarchic off-road racing in natural wildernesses: an American desert and volcanisland in the two PS3 entries to date, and the Arctic on PSP and PS2.

Sony registered the MotorStorm 3 domain earlier this year.

There's no word from Sony yet on whether these images are genuine and, if so, up to date. If we knew ourselves, we wouldn't be able to tell you. Sit tight for confirmation one way or the other as E3 approaches.