Extreme Bullrider

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Review: Extreme Bullrider

Budget games are for people who don't know games. They look at the $49.95 price tag on Alpha Centauri or Descent 3 and think "Fifty dollars for a game? You gotta be kidding!" When they see Deer Hunter for $19.95, they think, "Now, this is more reasonable" and they buy millions of copies. So now every big company has a budget line-Activision's under the auspices of Head Games. This is a superb bit of irony, considering there's nothing cerebral about most of them.

The newest Head Games--a sixtet of "Extreme" games--are a curious blend of hip sports and redneck recreation. Among the worst of the lot are Extreme Bullrider and Rodeo, both of which are indeed extreme: extremely awful.

You'll find a bit of overlap between the two titles. Both include a dippy approximation of bullriding. You move the mouse to balance a cursor against a drifting marker. It's not exactly a visceral representation of trying to stay on a kicking, snorting, angry 800-pound mammal.

Far more ridiculous is Extreme Bullrider's bullfighting game, in which a clown runs around collecting floating icons while avoiding piles of bright green dung and a slow bull. I've never seen bright green dung before, but then, I've never seen fleeing rodeo clowns referred to as bullfighting, either. Extreme Rodeo also includes barrel racing and calf roping with horses that move like battery-operated toys. The graphics are rough, the animations are crude, and some guy named Don Gay keeps cackling out commentary. Imagine a sixty-year-old Jethro Bodine hollering over your shoulder while you play a computer game and you get the idea.

The absolute worst in the series is Extreme Watersports, a shockingly bad excuse for entertainment. Not only is this one of the ugliest, least playable chunks of code I've ever had on my hard drive, but it's ill-behaved. A lot of the shell art was corrupted and wouldn't display. The sound refused to work and the little bugger enthusiastically crashed my computer several times. Imagine DOS era shareware graphics with Pong era gameplay. Water-skiing consists of moving the cursor left or right, just like those early racing games where a narrow road moves down the screen and you step your car to either side to avoid oncoming traffic.

With such actively bad titles as companions, Extreme Mountain Biking looks pretty good. It's sort of like a poor man's Motocross Madness with a more reasonable physics model. Unlike Microsoft's wild motorcycle game, you can't just constantly accelerate in EMB and expect to stay on your bike. To finish a race, you actually have to navigate the terrain and watch your jumps. The other bicycles play by the same rules., and they wipe out, too.

The sound effects in Extreme Mountain Biking include a low rumble that's supposed to pass for pedaling, but sounds instead like mopeds without mufflers. My real world bicycle certainly doesn't make that noise. The polygonal graphics for the bikes and riders are unambitious and the tracks barren of interesting features. The end result looks more like Extreme Badlands of North Dakota Biking than Extreme Mountain Biking, but I suppose budget titles have to be friendly to lower-end hardware.

In marked contrast, Extreme Wintersports, the best-looking game of the bunch, offers bright snowy terrain, colorful skies, well-drawn characters, and plenty of big and bold numbers. Unfortunately the controls [sic] render much of the game almost unplayable. Maneuvering a skier through a downhill course is more like bowling than skiing: just let him roll and hope he hits where you're aiming. But the snowmobile controls are inscrutable. I assume the developers were trying to model sliding across slippery surfaces, but it's pretty hard to collect powerups when you're driving something as responsive as an Eisenhower era Cadillac with broken steering.

The snowboarding stuff in Extreme Wintersports is decent. The controls are precise enough to make the stunts an interesting part of the races. Speaking of interesting, the female snowboarder is wearing a bathing suit top and you can see her thong sticking Lewinsky-style above the waistband of her pants. She should put on a sweater before she catches cold. Also interesting is the presence of a patronizing stoner dude who berates the contestants as the announcer.

It's enough to make one long for the dulcet tones of Don Gay.

Extreme Boards and Blades has the most promise of these games. It opens with a lively intro that seems to say, "Dude, like, we're here to, like, have fun, dude!".has the engine and interface to almost make good on this promise. Although set in fairly simple arenas, the character animation is pretty fluid and once you get the hang of the controls; a hint of gameplay starts to seep through. You push your skates or board until you've gathered enough speed, then you head for a ramp to get airborne. The goal is to perform stunts during the hang time and gather enough points to move on to the next arena. But each level allows only a certain number of falls, so you have to exercise a modicum of caution. It's not a terribly good game and it's not as fun as Extreme Mountain Biking, but it certainly has the most spirit. And in a collection of games this cheap (not to mention inexpensive), that counts for a lot.-- Tom Chick / GamePro