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The game also contains a multiplayer mode, so you and a friend can try your hand at such high-class endeavors as the Strip Challenge, "Skillz", and Paintball. Strip Challenge has the two players going head to head to perform combos and challenges, with the loser doffing an article of clothing every time their opponent completes a challenge. "Skillz", poor spelling aside, is just a basic contest mode, to see who can rack up the most points in a two minute run. In Paintball each player gets a turn as sniper, trying to take out your opponent while they attempt to collect boom boxes found in the level. The static camera and binary-style controls, needless to say, make it pretty easy to dodge the sniper… Bad sound effects seem to plague the game. There are a lot of inexplicable, stupid sounding crowd noises that appear from nowhere any time you complete or fail a trick along the way. Regardless of where you are or what you’re in the midst of doing, lame "oohs" and "ahs" accompany tricks. I’ve also noticed some particularly bad, unexplained feedback and humming noises in certain areas, such as the corner by the hookers’ motel in the Bronx level. The dialogue in the game is a decidedly mixed bag. Accents tend to be not only stereotyped, but off the mark in many cases (though others, like the pimp, hookers, bums, and trashy Italian residents of the Bronx level, are more or less dead on). Far from the standard in supposed high-energy extreme gaming soundtracks, the music selection in BMX XXX is dull, dull, and dull. Rather than the punk stylings of the Crazy Taxi series, the Street Sk8er series, the Tony Hawk series, or even Z-Axis’ own Aggressive Inline, you get a tired selection of Nu-Metal, with its boring and repetitive hip hop/aggro stylings, and one (count it, one) nod to the skatepunk origins of "extreme" skate and bike sports, with Green Day’s overplayed top 10 hit "Basket Case". Otherwise, it’s strictly snooze city, the province of the sort of pissed off, sweaty, daily-wanking teenage boys who are most likely to flock to this sort of game with a straight face and wide eyes. God help us, there’s even a Motley Crue song in there… Having no desire to play through and beat the entire game just to get the extras, I relied on that old unspoken standby of gaming, the cheat code, to unlock the various game levels, the amusing Amish Boy (who rides a wooden bicycle, and talks like something out of Austin Powers, rather than anything approximating the Pennsylvania Dutch), and the apparently endless overstylized video captures of Scores strippers. Ay, and there’s the rub, as the Bard once put it. Now I know that probably 90% of the game’s potential buyers are basing their selection on this very feature, so let me make this very clear: don’t expect much. I had a male friend view the 20 or so motion capture stripper videos with me, and found him both as bored as I was (and as the strippers are, barring the attractive and apparently quite professional antics of one "Dawn", who appears in a mere three of the videos), to the point of eliciting several yawns (and yes, they seemed to be genuine), and with no apparent signs of excitement or physical arousal on his part.
Basically, the videos all you sweaty palmed horndogs will be breaking your little butts to unlock consist of 4 mildly attractive, if obviously bored and surgically enhanced strippers from Howard Stern’s favorite sponsor, Manhattan’s own Scores strip club. With the exception of the aforementioned "Dawn", the girls wiggle a little (very little) and quite stiffly, like their hips have lockjaw; bend over slowly (and stiffly) at least 3 times per segment, like an old lady picking up dropped groceries; and end on fake blown kisses and less-than-heartfelt waves at the camera, like flight attendants used to do back in the days before airport strip searches (which, incidentally, might prove more arousing than these videos did). Two of the more bored and seasoned of the strippers appear in several of the later videos "dancing" together like strap hangers on a crowded subway, doubtless to excite fantasies of lesbian antics in the more subceptible of viewers. And perhaps I should also mention that the videos are shot in that irritating grainy stop-motion film style, like an E! fashion shoot. For the most part, the girls chosen for the live action portions of BMX XXX are the same kind of cheap, not incredibly attractive tramps you find hanging around in bars and the less exciting of clubs out there anyway; so if this is the best the strip bars have to offer, all you horny bastards might as well go hang out there and try to score one for yourself, instead of blowing your paycheck to watch them strut around a stage like bored housewives on the rag. As you might have picked up by now, the humor in BMX XXX, like the game itself, is extremely childish and puerile, peppered with cheap sex jokes and the barest smattering of nudity to keep the player interested. Like the Hollywood "blockbuster" or top 40 radio, it’s all about window dressing, desperately trying to misdirect the audience’s attention and obfuscate their view in the vain hope that this will somehow compensate for lack of any actual substance. That said, it’s worth a few laughs, and definitely the sort of thing to pull out at parties once the liquor’s been flowing sufficiently enough for the audience to appreciate the kind of moronic, locker room humor present here in abundance. As washed up idiot-favorite "comedian" Andrew Dice Clay might have said: "bada bing!" Highs:
Lows:
Final Verdict: Snore. An amusing purchase, filled with laughs (both intentional and not) and lowbrow humor for the less sensitive (and less discriminating) prospective buyer; but as far as its much touted sex angle, it’s strictly Hee Haw for the new millennium. Even early Benny Hill had more sex and lowbrow humor than this. If you’re really desperate for "intimate" views of some pretty skanky girls, you’d be better served picking up a copy of Swank. Get it for the absurdity of the premise, get it for the cheap laughs inherent to its little mini-missions (like taking hookers to meet their johns or delivering construction workers to the nearest port-o-san), but by all means save your money if you’re looking for something "forbidden" and "arousing". There’s more sleaze on one of those Sports Illustrated swimsuit specials than you’ll find here. Overall Score: 7.0 Additional Images:
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