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Acclaim’s
reputation hasn’t been in the best shape lately. Numerous times over
the past several months, Acclaim has been in the news for the stupid
publicity stunt du jour, ranging from attempting to get people to
sell advertising space on their tombstones in England to bribing
people to legally change their names to Turok for one year. Even
worse, they tried to coerce parents into officially naming their
offspring Turok as well. This might not be all that terrible were
the games that they were trying to push any good, but Acclaim’s
actual offerings outside the advertising arena have been lukewarm at
best. Then came the announcement that they would be taking Dave
Mirra BMX and merging it with topless women and general raunchiness,
and that would be their next big game. The result (after Dave Mirra
removed his name from the resulting product) would be BMX XXX, the
sexiest, raunchiest extreme sports game ever.
The first natural question is, of course, “What do BMX riding and
sexy, topless women have to do with each other?” The answer is
really nothing. BMX XXX is simply another extreme sports game with
some off-color tasks thrown in for good measure. You get an idea of
the caliber of the tasks when a gardener in the Bronx (the first
level) asks you to borrow a pimp’s poodle and bring it back to him
to distract a stray dog from pooping all over his grounds. (Of
course, he put it much more colorfully than I did.) If you’re still
of the school that thinks that the F-word is the funniest thing this
side of Monty Python, you’ll be right at home with BMX XXX. The
humor (if that’s what you can call it) never rises above that level.
The closest comparison one can make is to Conker’s Bad Fur Day for
the Nintendo64. The difference here is that Conker’s humor, while
over the top, was often clever (if occasionally nauseating). BMX XXX
just throws every normally taboo subject at the wall and hopes
something sticks.
Of course, there is a game underneath all of this, presumably.
Underneath the back-alley façade, however, we find an extremely
pedestrian extreme sports game. Tony Hawk 4 this is not, folks;
there’s a reason Dave Mirra didn’t want his name associated with
this game. BMX XXX attempts the free-form level design of the
aforementioned 600-pound gorilla of extreme sports titles (as well
as Aggressive Inline before it, which was developed by BMX XXX’s
developer, Z-Axis), but falters where the former succeeds. To put it
plainly: BMX XXX seems to do everything in its power to compel the
player to put down the controller and never want to pick it up
again. Much like Tony Hawk 4, one can ride around the levels and
talk to people in order to start a timed task. The problem is this:
upon failing (which one will do often for any given task), the
player must then navigate back to where the person was in order to
restart the task, which can often be a laborious process. Just to
make matters worse, some of the people who you must talk to get up
and leave after you speak to them, and you have to wait around for
them to come back before you can restart the task.
Just to add insult to injury, finding the person to kick off a task
is only part of the challenge; figuring out what you need to do to
complete a task is often more difficult than both finding the task
and completing it. As an example, one task requires you to “ghost
ride into a fruit booter”. Ghost riding is explained as part of the
task hints (for the curious, it’s jumping off your bike and letting
it roll away from you), but the game gives you no indication of what
a “fruit booter” is. I actually had to go to GameFAQs and read there
that “fruit booter” is slang for rollerblader before I could
complete the task. Other tasks are complicated simply by poor
instructions (one task tells you to find something on the first
floor that was actually on the second), or by the overly large
levels, as the game gives you no direction to start from, or even an
arrow or goal movie to follow. The result is utter frustration; it
takes a great deal of determination to continue playing this game.
Despite lame attempts at entertainment, the game feels more like
work than anything else.
A quick word on the main draw of the game, being the videos of
Scores girls that can be accessed by accomplishing certain tasks. If
this is your sole reason for renting or (heaven forbid) buying BMX
XXX, look elsewhere. Scores videos are only accessible after
finishing first in a competition, or after completing one of the two
most arduous tasks in any given level. You must collect all 45(!)
items to be picked up in a level in a single run, or after
successfully performing tricks on all 20(!) gaps in a level, none of
which are marked. Otherwise, the only incentives to complete tasks
are to open up the next level, for which only ten of the twenty
available tasks need be completed, leaving no incentive to complete
any of the other tasks… Not that more obnoxious tasks to perform is
much of an incentive to continue in this game, anyway.
The game’s control (the cornerstone of any good extreme sports game)
is decent, but is not as responsive as one would like. The button
setup is fairly standard for an extreme sports game (A jumps and
pedals harder to build speed, Y grinds, X does grab tricks, and B
does trick modifiers and other miscellaneous tricks). The problem is
that tricks don’t link adequately; trying to do multiple tricks in
the air is extremely hit-or-miss unless you consciously remove your
thumb from one button, pause for a split-second and move it to
another button. Needless to say, this is quite awkward when trying
to pull off an intricate combo.
Of course, there’s no need to pull off intricate combos when stalls
and lip tricks are extremely easy to hold for unreasonably long
periods of time, making high scores easily attainable despite the
occasionally frustrating control. In order to achieve the seemingly
impossible 600,000 points to complete a certain task, all that one
really needs to do is: launch into a grab trick land in a stall
(by holding Y; you don’t even necessarily need to be lined up with
anything to stall successfully), hold the stall, and pull a spin
trick on the way down. That’s 20,000 points right there; lather,
rinse and repeat. The designers tried to balance this out by
limiting the run with a life meter that depletes when you bail, but
all this does is discourage the player from trying new things, which
is the whole point of an extreme sports game. This seems somewhat
shortsighted.
What’s even more disappointing is that, for a game that should rely
on graphics (based on the fact that topless women are the main draw
of the game), the visuals are pretty poor. Character models are
fairly blocky and look very similar to one another; it seems that
the only detail that the designers paid attention to were the female
characters’ breasts. The camera, while supposed to stay behind the
character at all times, occasionally swings around, making
navigation difficult. The most glaring issue, though, are the
graphical bugs that run rampant. Clipping in particular is a
constant problem, as bike wheels pass through ramps as though they
were not even there, and pop through walls with ease. In all, BMX
XXX isn’t much to look at.
The one good aspect of this game is the sound. The soundtrack
contains an assortment of tracks of all different styles, including
Green Day’s “Basket Case” and Saliva’s “Click Click Boom”, as well
as some lesser known tracks. A random option would be nice, as the
same songs play in the same order for every run, so you hear the
first few songs over and over and rarely hear the last few. There’s
occasional voice acting, which is generally well spoken. The problem
is that a hooker shouting, “You suck more than I do!” is only funny
until about the hundredth time you hear it, and there is no
variation to be found. Repetition is the name of the game here.
Basically, the problem with BMX XXX is that it is one of those games
that really doesn’t have an audience. Those young enough to enjoy
the toilet humor to the fullest are too young (presumably) to buy
the game, and those old enough to buy it have probably will have
heard all the jokes a million times before. If you want topless
women and extreme sports together, you’d be better off buying a copy
of Playboy and alternating reading it with runs of Tony Hawk. As for
BMX XXX, leave it on the shelf and send a message that nudity is no
excuse for making a shoddy game.
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