Motocross Madness

As you may have guessed, this is a continuation of Microsoft's dirt-track-racing-sim line (along with both Monster Truck Madness games). Though the parallels between the games are well warranted (both are seen on late-night TNN, for example), these are two fundamentally different games.

Motocross racing games have been traditionally arcade-like (Sega and Nintendo have done this for years, and most recently, Red Line Racing has moved the sound and graphics forward). There has yet to be an accurate 3D-modeled race, though, which is where Motocross Madness finds its niche. This is motorbike racing for Direct 3D-compatible accelerator cards. You're going to be seeing a lot of the bikes and riders from plenty of camera angles and various degrees of zoom (MXM has three buttons reserved for fast "action" angle-switching). And because the rider is a separate object from the bike, you get a more realistic-feeling physics model than previous motorbike racing games. (Whether it's actually so real or not I can't say, as I have no desire to do the things that I put the rider through in this game. It looks real enough for this boy.)

The bike and rider act in conjunction; when the rider moves, the bike handles accordingly. When the bike crashes, both bike and rider are thrown accordingly. The first dozen or so crashes, I thought the rider was holding the body part that was hurt the most. Later crashes showed that they usually just moan and curl into a fetal position, holding their head and pointing at their legs and backs. Given the Knievel-like leaps and landings I was doing, these actions were appropriate. There's also a grunt and some sort of skidding sound that could, if you pretend, sound like something squishing. But in two seconds, you're back on your bike: realism is good only to a point.

Although MXM is a racing sim, you'll spend a good deal of the game in the air. During races, this just means landing correctly (and in time to miss the next dip in the road). In the "stunt quarry" games, however, the hang time is what you want to perform hot-dog tricks such as shoving your legs over the handlebars and standing on the seat. This is where the game shines: going at too-fast speeds then launching into the air and doing foolish things as a rider. You can do these tricks in all the events (you'll get a hearty cheer from the stadium crowd in the Supercross), though there's no reward but glory for doing it. The stunts are also the best way to check out the highly ridiculous and spectacular dismounts described above.

The stunt quarry tracks are at least interesting in shape and decent in rendering color (the Widowmaker quarry, in particular, makes amazing bends in reality, and is great for some serious time in the air). There is a decent variety of outdoor tracks, and a nice array of seasonal interior tracks as well. One thing that does not change is the terrain type. You're supposed to tell the difference between loose dirt and packed dirt, but there's no visible difference between the two. Another constant is the lack of anything but land. There's nothing else on the terrain (rocks, trees, etc.) that could be used as landmarks. There are also no maps for any tracks, so you're racing on memory alone. (For certain events, there's a compass to tell you where to go next, but a little advance knowledge never hurt.) Since these features are implemented in the Monster Truck Madness titles, it's sort of odd that they should be missing here.

There are additional assistants that you can activate, which function like training wheels while you focus on other areas of the game. You can have assistants for balance, steering, jumps, and turns. Yet all of the settings, for the bike and rider as well as the game, don't seem to make a large impact one way or the other in terms of performance or gameplay. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing I cannot say. The only judgement I can give is to get rid of those training wheels, because you just don't need 'em.

The inclusion of a track editor makes the racing portion virtually endless. The editor is something of a burden, though. Making maps isn't as simple a task as it could be. There are only three "turn" pieces; you must let the computer decide which way the turn will go. It will require a little creative deleting and forcing of pieces to create certain turns. Also, there's no connection between jumping and landing pieces, which can result in tracks that are either too hard or too easy. Because of the time it takes to render each track (a smaller one took about five minutes, not including design and actually running it in MXM), this experimentation seems to be a bit much on the player's behalf. It's also clear that the pieces may not join in certain cases (tabletops need to be paired with each other, but you can't see this until the track is made). You can't change elevation for track pieces, even though the designers did it with their own tracks (using the track editor, you could make two of the 16 default tracks). There's no tutorial or help for the editor, either, making design a hit-or-miss effort, which it should not be.

Where the game shines, though, is speed. This is a very fast game. One fall in the Baja event means it's over for you (especially tricky with randomly placed markers). Other riders can easily overcome you from behind, then bail out just as quickly. You can be in the lead, then loose balance. It's all a matter of timing, which makes a keyboard an extreme handicap for this game. You will also find that the more hardware that you have above the minimums, the more opponents you can have, and the smoother the races will be. The performance for most events is decent for full graphics and two opponents on a machine with the minimums, which means that you don't need to have massive system resources to enjoy the game (unlike the first Monster Truck Madness when it was released, for example).

The speed also applies to the rendering and the game itself. You can get by with the minimum requirements, but you'll have some problems with two or more opponents (either real or computer-based). The more power you have, the more opponents you can beat. And this is the other good point of Motocross Madness--multiplayer. This game is screaming louder than an engine at 4,000 RPMs for network/internet playing. You can connect to Microsoft's gaming site for a guaranteed challenger.

There are still some technical problems that need to be fixed. Sometimes during internet play, the hosting server would crash, often without any perceivable slowdown or difficulty. And the computer riders seemed to drive right through me without affect (while I crashed trying the same). The program also has some difficulty with certain Direct-series drivers; when I got a blue screen, Direct drivers were the given as the culprit. Doubtless the patch will be coming shortly.

The online documentation is poor. There are many features that are either underdocumented or just ignored. The Stunts section, for example, gives you Java animations of what each stunt looks like, but no instructions on how to perform them. A simple interactive trainer would be helpful here, but the effort wasn't given for some reason. You can customize your bike settings, but there's no decent explanation of why you would want to change the sensitivity of your suspension or your tire traction. More glaring is the fact that the help files need a browser to use, while the README file has requests that you not switch out of the game for any reason, or it will crash. Go figure.

Installation was also a little odd. Although you can install to any drive, you will need that free space on drive C, even if you're installing to a different drive. Grrr. On a side note, the installation program showed an alert box informing me that I did not have a browser on my machine, and that I would need one to view the help files. Would I like to install Internet Explorer 4? Well, no, because I actually have two browsers already installed on my machine, and neither are from Redmond. (Maybe this DOJ thing isn't such a bad idea.) The track editor takes 7MB, but you can only install it on the main installation (i.e., there's no option to add it later if you want). I made this mistake, and had to uninstall and reinstall the program, losing my bike settings and track records.

Despite these flaws, Motocross Madness is tremendous fun. Sure, you'll turn off that silly "extreme rock" soundtrack immediately, but you'll keep on coming back for fast and fun gameplay and extremely competitive multiplayer action. More notable is the fact that the game comes from Rainbow Studios, developers of the (unmentionable) Deadly Tide. Nice turnaround, folks.

Tips:

• Switching camera views in the middle of the race is nearly useless. Map those keys to some more useful functions.
• If you're going online for games, you should create a user profile that matches your online screen name. Otherwise, you'll be racing with the defaults for the bike and the controls.
• Tighten that suspension real good before going into a Baja race. Also remember to slow down when you see the marker. You want to make the turn and go through. Too often I hit the ring and lost the race.