Welcome to the world where super magnetic bikes glide
above the ground at a little more than the speed of light sending
waves of sonic booms to the nearby buildings. Oh yeah did I
forget to mention while your doing that people are shooting at you
trying to blow your bike into a million pieces? Welcome to the
world of Extreme G 2.
You might know this as the game that "Sucks" from your
local rental store browsing. There were quite a few pitfalls for
Extreme G 2 on it's original console, Nintendo 64. One of the main
things which turned many people off was the fact that it had
incredibly slow frame rates. A game that supposed to go the
speed of sound moving 20 fps and lower?... that doesn't quite mix
in my opinion. Probe has decided to go to the land where 3d
cards are on almost every single gamer's machine. But what does
fast fps have to do with anything when a game doesn't quite match
up to the racing genre on another console? That's a question that
every developer that wants to port games over from console to
computer ask themselves.
The graphics in Extreme G 2 are a little on the mixed
side. The frame rates are nice and crisp, on my machine it never
dropped below 30fps (estimate). As like every futuristic racer,
Extreme G 2's effects consist of real-time lighting, big explosions,
and lens flares on every single light source. The bad part of the
graphics in Extreme G 2 is that the bike detail isn't as high as I
would like it to be. It comes off looking over buffered, flat, and
overall just plain ugly. The backgrounds have pretty bad detail to
them, but I guess when your traveling that fast when do you have
enough time to actually look at a tree and see that it's missing a
few details?
When a computer game has graphics like the rest of the
games in the genre, you have to have something that makes it
better, and it's usually gameplay. Too bad Extreme G 2 doesn't
have good gameplay. Instead the game consists of the usual
weapons (Missiles, shields, and mines), which sounds good right?
There's one problem with the weapons. When your racing
against fast bikes that are going even faster than you, you don't
really have time to aim and shoot a mortar at a bike that's going
600mph. There are two modes of play in this game. The first one
is Single player. Single player lets you pick practice, time trial or
Arcade mode. Arcade mode, instead of the usual racing against
other bikes in a single race as you might think, is just an infinite
number of loops around the track trying to kill drones for the whole
time trying to beat the high score. The second mode is Extreme
Racing. This mode lets you compete in Four different cups. (Heh,
cups. -ed.) With each win in the cup you get new tracks and a new
"superbike" to use. Extreme G has 12 tracks with 3 variations of
each one. The tracks range from a hot volcano to racing on trees.
One of the things that I really liked about Extreme G 2 was when
you hit a certain speed you started to go faster than sound. When
you brake the sound barrier, you hear a boom then a windy noise
like you were in the cabin of a car going 80 mph until you slow
down again.
One of the bad things about this game is that it gets
boring too fast. After you've seen 1 or 2 tracks, you start getting to
know what everything is going to be like. Probe could've had a
saving grace in this game. If they only kept in mutiplayer and
added in TCP/IP support for Extreme G 2 then the whole game
would've been so much better. I for one love to race against my
friends and blow then up. I'm sure a lot of other people like to do
that too. But Probe definitely buried the title the minute they took
out the mutiplayer. All of a sudden, instead of playing a fast
paced game going at the speed of sound, you're wishing you
never spent money on the thing and end up driving back to your
local EB at the speed of sound trying to return it before you
misplace your receipt.
12/20
10/15
15/30
13/20
0/5
5/10