Jet Grind Radio

"Great fun for fans of the series, but not without flaws"

I loved Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast. Often credited incorrectly as being the first use of cell shading in a video game (that honor goes to Fear Effect on the PS1), Jet Grind Radio wowed audiences back in 2000, and for me, served as a major purchasing decision for a Dreamcast. (Shenmue, Crazy Taxi, and a low price point also influenced my decision). Jet Grind Radio had a significant impact on the games industry. As most developers concentrated more and more on ''photo-realistic'' graphics, Jet Grind Radio showed us that games did not have to be photo-realistic to be beautiful.

The conversion to the game boy advance is amazing, but slightly flawed. It was developed by the same studio as the Tony Hawk GBA games, the mark of quality is there.

The levels are very accurate compared with the Dreamcast version. After getting my bearings with the isometric perspective, I remembered the levels from the Dreamcast version and was able to find my way around quite easily. The levels are so accurate that I found myself using the same strategies from 3 years ago.

While the game gets kudos for staying true to the original level designs, it's not always a good thing. The fixed isometric perspective has numerous problems with buildings or obects blocking the view of your character. They attempt to solve this by making your character shaded when they are behind an object, however, this doesn't really help. If instead they made the object blocking you transparen it would have fixed a lot of problems. This way you would be able to see where the border of the blocking object is instead of fumbling your way around it.

The sound is also amazing, probably one of the best sounding games available on the Game Boy Advance. I giggled with delight at the opening ''Jet Grind Radiooooooo'' and a selection of songs from the original. However, there is no sound to notify you that you are taking damage, which causes problems when you are surrounded by enemies and trying to tag that last spot. The only indicator that you are taking damage is that your health bar lowers. Again, my suggestion to the developers here would be to add in a few sound effects to alert the gamer they are taking damage.

The difficulty seems slightly easier than the original. Grinding on objects is very easy and you rarely miss, expect for circumstances where the perspective make it difficult to judge where you're really at. However, a few things are just hard (if not harder) as the original, specifically the races. The perspective makes it difficult to follow the paths of the opponent, and the fact that the computer opponents are just outright faster than you make it extremely frustrating.

I was surprised as hell they included the custom graffiti editor in there. I wasn't expecting that and is a nice inclusion.

The character models are a low point of the game, especially compared side by side to the character models in Tony Hawk 2 for GBA. I think a little more effort in this department would have been nice.

I also discovered a bug that will lock up the game if you slide up the left side of a rail sometimes. Bugs like this should have been caught, especially on consoles with no chance to patch against it.

Overall, the graphics and sound are nice, the gameplay is fun but the difficulty and controls can be frustrating. Fans of the series should not miss out on this, you will love it. If the perspective problems could have been fixed a little better this would be a ''must have'' title for everyone.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/03