There was a time when the most erotic thing you could find in a videogame was a flash of thigh from Street Fighter’s Chun Li. Then came the age of the bulging Lara Croft, and all her organ-free-waistline counterparts. So, where do you go from there? How does a game developer up the ante once again? Easy, by including some grainy movie footage for you to unlock of actual ladies actually taking their actual clothes off. Is it an ingenious gameplay mechanism, endeavouring to expand the horizons of developers and the minds of players, or a publicity seeking, self-perpetuating hype monster? Go on, have a guess.
If you’ve ever played any of the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX games, then you should already know if you like this or not, as it’s very similar.
Though as you may have already gathered, this game is littered with mildly offensive language and naughty themes. You use one button to pull off tricks and another to modify the trick in question. When you tally up all the possible trick variations and combos, it amounts to quite an impressive number. But the problem lies not with the quantity, but the quality. You see, none of the tricks feel at all special, or even satisfying when you pull them off. In the Career mode, you can freely ride around the levels (there’s no timer) taking on challenges by speaking to the pedestrians that you’ll find milling about. These goals are mostly standard fair for the genre, except for the fact that occasionally you’ll be required to pick up people or objects and drop them off at a designated point. Seeing a gang of monkeys hanging off your bike is very amusing, but unfortunately doesn’t affect the way your bike handles. Most of these challenges are introduced by a small cutscene. These are mainly where the game displays its humour, like when you encounter a fireman clutching a flaccid hose, complaining about his inability to “get it up”. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the places where the game falls flat on its face. These cut-scenes more often than not fail miserably when it comes to actually explaining how to complete your objective. It is a regular occurrence that you’ll be told to find an item or hit a switch and have absolutely no idea what you’re looking for. One goal you are given at an early stage in the game requires you to wreck your bike into a “fruitbooter”. You are given no explanation as to what this is, you are just expected to know. As it turns out, a “fruitbooter” is a term for an inline skater. This makes the game seem sloppy, and more than a little frustrating.
There are also a few two-player modes to muck about on, and they are actually quite fun. There’s a highest scoring combo competition, where the loser ends up being stripped down to their underwear, and a straight-forward score-based contest. One particularly memorable mode is where one player has to collect all the boom boxes that are scattered around the level while the other player, who remains stationary, is armed with a variety of weaponry, from grenade launcher to sniper rifle, and has to shoot down the other player, preventing the boxes from being collected. It has to be said that BMX XXX is not going to be winning any beauty contests. This one fell out of the ugly tree, and hit a few branches on the way. Not all of them, but a few. The levels are large, and for the most part look okay, but the riders themselves look dull and are poorly animated. The rider tends to simply jerk into position from one trick to the next. FX are decent enough, if a bit repetitive at times with most of the pedestrians only having one phrase that they insist on repeating over and over again. The licensed soundtrack is for the most part very good.
As for the “mature” content, well that is perhaps the best joke of all. Calling the content of BMX XXX mature is a bit like calling a Carry On movie high-brow. Mindless schoolboy tits and toilet humour is the order of the day, and if you happen to be a particularly immature 12-year-old male, you might just find it funny. But probably not. Instead of shelling out for this mediocre title, you’d be better off getting a copy of the latest Tony Hawk’sgame and downloading some grainy glamour material from the Net. But only if you’re over 18, obviously.