BMX XXX

"What a terrible excuse for a game"

One idea in today's society is that sex sells. Clearly it does, or companies wouldn't keep doing it. The people at Z-Axis got to thinking ''Hey, if it works for everything else, maybe we can do this to sell video games!'' Boy, was that ever a mistake.

Graphics: 2/10
This is a Gamecube game, not a Nintendo 64 game, right? Yes, but it's very hard to tell the difference. The graphics are just horrible. The cell-shading job makes every character look like poorly-made clay figures. When you move, you can clearly see all the polygonal shapes within them. The custom characters look pasty and disproportional(make a woman and see what I mean). The levels themselves don't look bad, but that's more in comparison to the character sprites. The videos in the game are nice and crisp, which makes the fact that the game graphics are terrible just that much worse.

Music: 2/10
I've come to expect alternative rock music in games of this nature. But in BMX XXX we are treated mostly to rap and grunge-rock. Not only that, but they are mainly profanity-laced songs. I don't have a problem with profanity, but they are quite excessive with it in this game.

Sound: 0/10
The over-done language isn't just limited to the music. It also floods the dialogue. Every time you talk to someone about your next mission, it seems like they curse every 5 words. It went from funny to annoying very quickly. The sound effects just plain suck. The grinding, the hard landings, the crashes, the splashing into water......it all sounds very artificial. Even the menu noises sound bad.

Controls: 2/10
There wasn't much control to speak of. Turning is bad. Doing air combos is damn near impossible. When you try to reduce your speed, you turn completely around. More signs of developer's laziness.

Gameplay: 2/10
Certain aspects that have made other games of this type successful and fun are missing from BMX XXX. There is no practice mode. In a game of faulty and/or difficult controls, you need a practice mode so you can perfect combos or simply have fun in empty, time limitless levels. The multiplayer mode is sorely lacking. There are three multiplayer modes. ''Normal'', in which you both do your own thing with a split screen. There is seemingly no winner or competition in this mode. ''Paintball'', when one player looks for 3 boom boxes, while another is forced to stand in one spot and shoot the other player. Of course, you can only see a little bit of the area around you, so winning is hard. ''Strip poker'', where you get many clothes put on you and somehow you need to make the other player lose his clothes by doing tricks. I could never figure out what triggers are for doing this. There should have been a create a park as well. Even the N64 version of Tony Hawk had this.

The mission mode will frustrate you to no end. They ask you to do endlessly hard tricks, collect boom boxes, or do really weird jobs, such as picking up hookers and returning them to their pimp. I did not need to hear a video game hooker say ''Can you take me back to my pimp, pleeease?'' Your motivation for doing all these things is to unlock levels, improve your stats, and the obvious selling point of the game: unlock videos of strippers. The reason the game looks and plays so bad is because Z-Axis wanted to concentrate on bringing you high quality videos of naked and nearly-naked women as opposed to making a fun video game.

Replay value: 0/10
There is virtually none. It's a bad game, and after playing it once you won't want to again.

Rent/buy?
Don't buy it. Rent it if you must, but you'll regret it.

Overall score: 2/10

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 03/31/03, Updated 06/30/03