BMX XXX Review
Now every male has to be a little interested in this game, don’t lie. It promises topless riders, raunchy characters, great songs with uncut lyrics, and strip videos. But overall, this is just a slapped together game seemingly made by some immature adults wanting to laugh at a poopy joke while playing a video game. This game should be called BM Quadruple X, because it portrays a bowel movement more than a BMX game.
Sadly, this game is just a hair’s worth of funny. Watching the gardener cuss out the dog and then flash you over to a pimp yelling at his prostitute does sprout out some laughs. But at the completion of the confusing goal, you get to watch a 5 second video of the park dog humping the pimp’s dog…funny, but sickening too.
BMX XXX is the first game to say the F word openly. While they do censor the subtitles, the characters will say this word so many times it becomes normal, and not exactly funny. Maybe bleeping this word out would’ve made the game just a little bit funnier, like Rare did in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. Listening to those little animals trigger the censorship was probably funnier than if they would’ve let them say the word.
BMX XXX does not come close to most of the other next gen extreme sports games in visuals. Graphically all of Activision’s GameCube titles are far superior to this game. Your rider’s and surrounding’s graphics aren’t bad, so to speak, but they could’ve been better. On the upside I haven’t found much problems with the framerate.
The ultimate question is, “Is BMX XXX fun?” I would have to say yes; yes it sort of is fun. For one, its very easy to keep your grinds and manuals for a very long time. While not totally realistic, it allows you to pull together bigger combos, easier. The only problem is, BMX XXX’s controls are sometimes non-responsive. So if you come off a long grind and hit Up then Down to do a manual, it just might not do it. You’ll find yourself hitting Up and Down as many times as you can before you hit the ground to assure you get that manual in. Or, someone might tell you a trick to perform and give you the directions and button to hit, but even after hitting these buttons your rider will either do a different trick or do no trick at all. It gets very frustrating. Also, the game will sometimes glitch out so bad you’ll crash just because your bike somehow magically fused with the slope of the quaterpipe.
Another unrealistic point is that you can save yourself from crashing (if the game doesn’t glitch of course) by just tapping a direction and Y before landing. This will launch your rider into a stall and once you bunny hop from the stall you can land easily on flat ground.
To continue the list of bad features in this game I will explain how plain confusing the goals of this game are. In the Dam level a “wise guy” asks you to wall tap/ride two switches in the dam building, to drain a canal. The thing is the game does show a panning shot of the area in which they might be and does not event hint on what these switches might look like. Also, in the Bronx level a fellow rider asks you to Ghost Ride your bike into a “fruitbooter.” How many of us don’t know what a fruitbotter is? I didn’t, but the people at Z-Axis must’ve thought my kind were few. I had to look up this term and find out that it is slang for an inline skater. Maybe if the game would’ve shown the skater after saying this term I might’ve connected the two, but Z-Axis didn’t see fit to do it that way.
The replay value of this game is so low because of the confusing nature of the goals, no free ride mode, no create a park, and stupid multiplayer games. In the one of the games you try to beat combo records to make your opponent lose an article of clothing (in the end of the game the loser doesn’t even get naked) also there’s just a normal “Skillz” mode where you try to beat your opponent in highest scores. The addition of a Horse mode would’ve made all the difference.
While others might disagree with me, I think the controls of this game are very simple and great for making any variations of different moves. You perform air tricks with a direction (or two) and B or X. You can tweak moves by pressing the direction of one, and then the other and B or X. If Superman is diagonal Up + Right + B and Backflip is Down + B then pressing diagonal Up + Right + Down then B would perform a Superflip (a.k.a. Superman Backflip). This is actually quite fun to experiment with and try to make up different moves. A direction and Y perform grinds, and Up + Down or Down + Up performs a manual or nose manual. You can do flatland tricks in a manual but you have to press a direction and B, which can sometimes mess up your balance, and you MUST not be holding down A. This makes flatland tricks worthless since most all of the time you are holding down A for speed, and releasing it in mid-manual will lose your manual.
This game’s sound is its strong point just plainly because it has some great songs in their original form. Saliva’s “Click, Click, Boom” is the theme song of BMX XXX and it fits rather well. The voice acting isn’t horrible, but its nothing like Eternal Darkness’s or event Sonic Adventure 2’s for that matter. You’ll also hear many things in real-time play said over and over again. If you fall in the skate park in the Bronx some guy will say “Didn’t I see you on world’s worst bikers?” almost every single time. You almost want to jump into BMX XXX’s deranged world and strangle that guy until he pukes blood and his…brains…spill…sorry.
BMX XXX is no breakthrough game. It is original in the fact that it cusses a lot, and it’s the first game to feature strippers and topless riders. Do not buy this game. Rent it, laugh at it, get tired of it, and give it back. You want a funny game? Buy Conker’s Bad Fur Day, its $10 to $15 most everywhere with old games. Now that is a piss-your-pants funny game.