N-Philes

Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2

Posted by Archived.

I sometimes find that I have the remarkable ability to prejudge videogames without every actually playing them for myself. However, some of my "foresights" are not without their merit. For instance, take Dave Mirra XXX. Theoretically, the Dave Mirra franchise must suck and putting porn into it is the only way to get people to play it. I'm quite proud of this theory, took me over five minutes to conceive. Seeing as I was never, ever, going to play Dave Mirra XXX (the sales guys at Best Buy would make me feel self-concious, like they do when old guys buy copies of "Girls Gone Wild"), I decided to pick up Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2.

Graphics

It's usually a visual wonderland. I've heard complaints of the riders not being very detailed, but from my vantage point, it's pretty gosh darn good. If you have problems with it, try playing the N64 for a few hours and then come back. Draw distances are your typical run of the mill type, nothing atrocious like Tony Hawk 2 (N64) but nothing like being able to see the New York skyline from Philadelphia. Obviously. Each level is lush, beautiful, and completely different from the others. Graphics generally depend on the level at hand. Some levels run more smoothly than others; I've experienced some majorly bad slowdown during the Swamp/Forest level. I've found that breaking stuff like windows causes a lot of stuff to fly everywhere, and the gaming engine doesn't handle it well. Some camera issues have arisen, where the camera just stops the biker keeps on moving. I don't know really how or why it happened; I just know that it did.

Sound

Like every extreme sports game, it has a fairly rockin' soundtrack. Basically, all the music's a little over two years old, and it harkens me back to that time when TRL also supported punk. My personal favorite is Fenix TX's "All My Fault," which I've found myself humming at work. There's a little problem with this song, it falls short of the run time, so it starts over with fifteen seconds to go. It's just a wee bit annoying.

Gameplay

Starting out, I was slightly disappointed, but seeing as I was expecting a bad game anyways, that didn't shake me. Sadly, the game and every other extreme sports title will be compared to Tony Hawk, and naturally, this review will be the same. It suffers from the "first thirty minutes of Tony Hawk syndrome." You know what I'm talking about, the first thirty minutes where you don't know what you're doing and you suck. But I trudged onwards. One would think this game would be very similar to Tony Hawk in every aspect, but no, my friends, this time you're on a bike. A bike is a very different thing than a skateboard. It's a lot bigger, and therefore, trickier to handle. I have learned that 360's and 720's usually aren't good to attempt, because the biker will end up landing backwards. As you'll remember, in Tony Hawk, the skater just turned his head. No such luck here. This adds for a whole mess of strategy, because you can goes backwards (it's called an "Alley Oop") which will garner you more points, you just don't get nearly as much speed or air. Jumping is slightly problematic, you have to push A to prime yourself, and then push A again to jump. It's weird.

How Does It Compare to Tony Hawk?

This is really what you guys all want to know. You're scanning to find out, "Should I get this, because I liked Tony Hawk or is it just another crappy knockoff?" Z-axis really pulled out all the stops to make this game better than Tony Hawk, and I think it succeeded. First, they added a height meter, to see how much air you're getting. Sure, not terribly important, but it's nice to see how high you've jumped. Second, whenever you're near one of your objectives, the words, "Do this..." appear at the top of your screen. And, this is my favorite part, it highlights your objective. So, if you're supposed to Wall-Ride four specific walls, each one flashes in green. I can't tell you how many times I've gone through Tony Hawk 2 looking for this "Venice Ledge to Tailslide." Which brings me to my third point, if you press pause, you can see a listing over every single trick your skater is capable of and how to pull them off (so you actually know how to "manual" in a certain place). Fourthly, the levels are huge. I'm not normally a fan of big levels, but it's just like, "Wow, there's so much to do." Fifthly (I think I'm making up words now), you get a progression of goals. The first time you play, you have a Rookie goal (get so many points), then you get four moderately simple goals, then four more, and the difficulty of these increase. It's cool, because it progresses, as you naturally get better. And lastly, the Level Goals are actually innovative, and I sincerely doubt I've seen anything like some of these in Tony Hawk. One of them is "Grind 525 feet of railing." Let me tell you guys, 525 feet is like a tenth of a mile. It's frickin' huge. Also, there's stuff like, "Pull together a 10,000 point trick." In Tony Hawk, it was "Get 40,000 points in one session." One trick, or trick-chain really, for 10,000 points is remarkably difficult. I had to get creative, search for some serious trick lines to pull it off, and one time, I got to 9,712, and I was mad. I finally conquered the beast and was quite proud of myself, so I celebrated by eating some good old, wholesome Dairy Queen ice cream.

This game gets an N-Philes score of B+.

On the whole, I found Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX 2 to be quite a thrilling ride. And I have also concluded that is superior to the Tony Hawk franchise, because it tweaked the tiny problems and made a great game out of it. Isaac Newton once said,

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