MotoGP'06

"The Good the Bad and the downright Ugly"

First let me explain that I am a massive fan of this game and play it online everyday and get a whole lot of satisfaction from it. That said this can be the most excellent and worst game on the 360 to date. Let me explain.

Game Play – The Good

It's a motorbike game. That is to say immediately it requires a bit more skill than your average racing game. Not only do you have to position the bike correctly on the track if you want to stay on it, you must also compensate for lean time. A friend said to me: “The games great if you don't want to turn any corners”, meaning the dude was a bit new to this kind of racing and never really understood the concept of a brake and the fact that you cant turn ‘just like that', as they say.

The game features all the current tracks and riders from the 2005/6 seasons with an added extreme mode that you can race in 3 different speed settings, 600cc, 1000cc and 1200cc. I personally don't like the extreme mode of the game as it's purely for arcade racers, which are not what im about. The GP mode however is brilliant. Choose from all the tracks and all the riders.

With the main game and single player campaign you can create your own rider, just like you could in the others and if you like, change the skins of the leathers and bikes using a layer system similar to that of Forza MS. There are difficulty settings, four of them (one you have to unlock) and they will challenge you when you aren't online. If you manage to beat that then there is always the time trails where you can beat your own set times and compare them with that of your friends and the top racers on xboxlive.

There is an in game seed system that is also used online and all it is, is a marking of how far you've beaten the game or other riders that are better than you. For eg if you have a seed of 1 you constantly beat people, a seed of 50 however will go down if you beat people with a lower seed, obviously it will go up if people with a higher seed beat you.

The online play I have to say is one of the best around; there are some really talented racers out there. There are many online leagues going on at the moment, which makes this game playable online with a large user base until the next racer comes out.

Like most racers this game has a system to change ur gear ratios to really maximize your times. This is a great feature all serious racers must have.

The bad

Now we are going to get to why this game could be the worst experience you ever have on a 360 and that is the glitches that have come shipped FREE with the game, that's right folks you didn't have to pay an extra dime for this frustration.

The game constantly crashes during loading screens. This is great you get into a room online and then the next news the loading screen freezes. The only way to get out of this is to restart the xbox and NO! The middle button does not work so you have to get up and switch the damn thing off.

The loading times in the one player game are very long so you'll have plenty of times to make a cup of tea during races.

Sometimes in online mode and in rooms you cannot hear anyone or they cannot hear you or you can only hear one person talking. I don't understand this as most of the time you log on see the talking indication but hear nothing. The community has found a way to remedy this and it is to totally sign out of xboxlive from the dashboard, yes that means quit your game and then log back in to that room. 4 times out of 10 this will work but others in the room will be in the same situation you were just in so still you may not be able to hear the room talking or at least some of the people.

If you have more than 25 friends in your friends list you cannot access the xboxlive friends times sheet. This is where you can compare yourself to the mates you have in your friends list. This glitch freezes the game if you access the se scoreboards. A patch came out a week ago to remedy this but ive had it happen 6 out of 10 times when ive accessed my friends score boards.

The AI plain sucks. If you're a cockpit view racer like me don't expect any brains from the AI. If you take a bad corner or go-slow into one on a hard difficult, the AI just plows straight through you. To remedy this do a qualifying run to make sure you are at the front of the pack but watch that first corner anyways.

There is also another lobby glitch ive found where if you go into your set up, and return to the lobby you have a ‘in menu' icon next to your name. This presents the problem of long game launch times as some people wait for you to have the thumbs up symbol which you cannot do anything about.

Cockpit view. The game was made with the developers probably thinking that no-one will ever use this as no speedometer, revs or anything is displayed. Also if you're playing a race with the collisions on warn everyone before hand that u may knock someone off, as you cannot see anything left and right of you at all. Also with this view if you are going down a long straight you bike moves forwards and makes fast corner hard braking a bit difficult. Woe is me.

Sometimes when you set a fastest time you get an issue with accessing the scoreboards and an error blocks your screen until, you back out of the game using quick button presses. You can just carry on with this message but if you set any further times your records will not be set.

My biggest gripe is that this game is just motogp 3 released on the xbox but with the new methods of making it play on a 360 as all these problems existed on that as well, so if you are reading this and thinking this is a new game it really is not.

Overall

The game is great to race but it gets hampered with all these glitches. My inspiration for writing this review came after I was winning a race and then the game froze up on me for probably the 8th time this week. I know its not a problem with my game or machine because we all say the same things in the lobby. The community is very strong and very dedicated to making this game work. It is a great racer but seems to be made arcady bu release. In the second one there was a simulation option and u could change the simulation to 0 – 100%. The reason I mention this is because some of the fastest racers just powerslide all the corners in the game. To me that aint tracing as the motogp riders don't do it so much in real races. Its because of this ill never get into the really fast times as I refuse to do it, or cant do it because I race in cockpit view.

The game is certainly worth a buy but be ready for some frustrating days ahead if youre a real bike racer fan

Graphics 8
Sound 8
Gameplay 8
Replay 8
Online 9
Difficulty 8 - Hard
Overall 6 – (Not an average) The cons outweigh the pros

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/06