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PlayStation2 Gravity Games: Bike
Street. Vert. Dirt
Developer: Midway | Publisher: Midway
Rating: C-PBMaX
Type: Action Players: 1-2
Difficulty: Advanced Released: 9-05-02

The rise in popularity of extreme sports has had a direct impact on the video game market. Extreme sports titles hit every console in masses, each looking for some of the critical acclaim that genre leader Tony Hawk's Pro Skater revels in. Thus, it seems only fitting that the king of arcade-style sports games, Midway, enters the fray with Gravity Games Bike: Street. Vert. Dirt.

The core of the Gravity Games' single-player experience is the career mode. You select a rider from a collection of real-life pros and fantasy athletes. These range from the typical bikini-clad women to the more bizarre, like skeletons. Then it's time to pick a course and attempt to meet the conditions of several preset tasks. You have three minutes to complete as many tasks as possible and then you're forced to restart and take another run. Complete enough tasks and you'll unlock new courses to test your biking skills.

There are task-based courses as well as trick competition courses. In the latter, you simply try to score as high as possible in three consecutive runs. The task courses offer a lot of variety in their goals. Each level asks you to score a certain number of points, collect icons to spell "Gravity", and to perform a "Sick Trick" plus many additional environmental based tasks. The first two courses alone will have you running down vandals, freeing a woman tied to railroad tracks, and draining pools of acid.

While the potential for a quality game is there, control issues keep that potential from being realized. Tricks are performed by a series of directional taps in conjunction with the Square button. They can be chained together using the Circle button to perform modifier tricks. Problem is, there is a bit of lag between the button press and its execution. This makes simple things, like bunny-hopping to a rail, very difficult. The lag also throws the timing of the modifier moves off, making it extremely difficult to chain tricks successfully.

Steering your bike is also a bit of a chore. The bike overreacts to inputs, which leads to zigzags instead of straight rides. This makes navigating any line that requires precise positioning an extremely frustrating experience.

There are also many problems with collision detection and bike physics. It's not uncommon to simply get stuck in the environment, leaving you struggling to free yourself. Once you crash, you often react as if you are bouncing off of objects that do not exist. If you crash off a ledge, your character will hang in mid-air as if he is lying on an invisible floor. This leads to an unpredictable gameplay experience, which results in many a failed trick attempt.

Ironically, all of the control problems will not keep you from racking up big scores. The trick and combo systems have taken the strange direction of allowing you to perform the same trick consecutively. Combine that with the fact that it's ridiculously easy to balance on your pegs and you have a system just begging to be abused. So you want to "pull a sick trick?" How about simply balancing on a lip and hopping up and down for three minutes? Using this method, one can easily score 200,000 points in one trick, thus completing several tasks at once. This of course renders a lot of the tasks meaningless and offers no incentive for players to perfect their skills.

The game also offers a quick start and free-ride modes to help you learn the courses outside of your career. There are also several multiplayer games so you can challenge one of your buddies. While these modes offer some variety, the mediocre gameplay that accompanies them won't make you eager to play.

Graphically, Gravity Games is well below what we have come to expect on the PS2. While levels are very large and nicely modeled, the textures applied to them are not appealing. This is especially true in the dirt courses, whose looks can only be described as ugly. The blocky, low-res textures look only slightly better than those in low-budget PSOne titles. Animation of your biker is a series of stiff and clunky movements that looks entirely unrealistic.

This all adds up to a very disappointing game. Broken gameplay elements combined with ugly visuals and generic licensed music are not the way to take the extreme sports crown. The foundation for a good game is here, it just feels as if every aspect was rushed. As it is, the game is playable; it's just not much fun.

· · · PBMaX


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Rating: C-PBMaX
Graphics: 5 Sound: 4
Gameplay: 6 Replay: 5
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