Ed Oscuro
05-11-2004, 09:54 AM
I'm sure that most folks consider this series from Acclaim to be a poor man's F-Zero or Mario Kart (except that if you were really poor you would buy F-Zero and Mario Kart instead). One of the many N64 titles I've had since the N64 was current was Xtreme G 2; but since 1997 I've been wondering what the original was like. An old issue of Nintendo Power I recieved from a friend (also when it was new) gave it an 8.1 (if I remember right) and reported it was loads of fun.
I recently bought a copy from Neo Zeed's hopping "ClubNinja" and I now understand why the series has taken a while to catch on (assuming it actually did)! XG2 has an "arcade" mode where you can zip around the track catching armaments and blasting bite-sized baddies to kingdom come with them and your main gun; you recieve power-ups that offer various more or less useful bonuses that you can upgrade if you keep from using them immediately. Every now and then a "mothership" comes by and if you can tag that you get an extra helping of points. Your main problem lies in keeping your shield gauge filled up; if it runs down to nothing as a result of bumping into the track walls your ship explodes and it's game over. It's balanced, fast, mindless fun.
The first thing I tried out with the original XG was the shooter mode. The difficulty between various tracks seems very much unbalanced; on the first track I played I was able to destroy 60 critters after just a few runs by moving almost at a crawl and sending homing missiles (this would be the rightmost track on the map select screen, with skyscrapers in the track thumbnail; of course only three levels were open to me never having played it before). On the other hand, some maps force you to move quite quickly as homing missiles don't seem to navigate the course as well. All along there are tons and tons of absolutely useless mortar items (which look like the standard rocket "R," of course) which you might kill something with if you're right on its bumper and using a turbo item at the same time. I didn't get a kill with one of these the whole time I played and burning a turbo just to try would've been silly. What's more, you can't seem to drop a weapon with the C buttons; I think you might be able to with the L shoulder button but I'm not sure (I think I saw a bike drop a mortar in the demo...). You have to eyeball what you've picked up; aside from the homing missiles with their red "H" icon, all the other weapons in "shooter" mode have an "R" with perhaps a slightly different tint or different arrows coming off the top. There's no voice cue as to what you've picked up such as in XG2. Weapons take far too long to equip on top of your vehicle. Your main gun is very much useless nearly all of the time in this mode, which is a shame (in XG2 I could power up the main gun and let it sit there destroying enemies for me, in XG your weapon dribbles out low energy shots instead). It's nice that they let you get a variety of weapons compared to XG2's single pulse cannons, but none of the shots follow the track's curves upward and downward; unless your shots are perfectly lined up and you're traveling along a consistent grade they just hit the track and explode. Basically, shooter mode looks like it was tossed together at the last moment.
It's also amazing how bad the game looks compared to the old NP screenshots. I recognize various landmarks from the magazine's screenshots such as the big-headed ancient alien statues, but somehow the maps all manage to be very bland and their locales very indistinct. That doesn't mean that the maps aren't full of unintentional tricks, however; on the first map I played you pass through a section of what appears to be highway (with barely readable exit signs marking "Space Port") with a divider section. I must've hit the street lights in the middle of that street four or five times playing the game for just half an hour; what's more, you don't just hit them and stop but your bike tries to climb up it. That's a good five seconds wasted trying to get back up to speed.
Graphically, the game is pretty damn poor compared to Mario Kart 64 and just about every title I have on the system (aside from one of the early wrestling titles) betters it in every way. I don't think XG2 looked this bad even without the expansion pack (though I haven't tried playing without...). Textures are terrible; poly counts are so low that you can just about count triangles as you drive by, and everything's pretty straightforward. "Scenery" can be equated with "we have burning barrels along this highway, on that map we have something that looks like a steam shovel, and here we have a big sign which says "OCEAN CLUB." I like that. Ocean Club. Takes me miles away from this dreary game. One map has you inexplicably driving through a cloud of batlike creatures which might actually be your fans; while they don't cause slowdown, it is rather strange all the same. In XG2 whenever billboard sprites were used they were subtle touches to finish off an area's mood, such as the alien giraffes on the wind plains (whatever that's called, Teras Kasi perhaps?) In the alien ruins map on XG, there's a section with strange (but huge) billboard signs that actually throw off your sense of perspective. One final sin is that you never ever can go backwards...instead you seem to get sucked towards the walls. Trying to use your brake while stationary might cause you to zip forwards as well.
Music and sound effects...the game had all of two guys working on this department and it shows. The tunes are awful techno stuff, the sound effects are only slightly better and out of it all only bike sounds and explosions sound like they do in the sequel. I think everything else was scrapped, though come to think of it I didn't hear anything else except for static when I change bikes and some bouncing boulders at one point...XG2 had some nice voice work, and what's more it had a good deal of it to help you understand what was going on around you.
This game doesn't do everything horribly, though; the intro sequence is quite good (if anybody has seen XG2's opening with that terrible, horrible, grinning...THING...in the bike cockpit...you have known fear as I have), the framerate doesn't seem to dip much (heh), there's some nice frontend touches (though comparing times in time trial mode isn't one of these, as it only shows your best time afterward...) such as the fading "Press A to enter a password" scroller inside maps you haven't unlocked on the memory card, and there's some nice effects when the scene changes. In the demo there are moments where the game has two race scenes rendered at once while it cuts to another scene; one effect has strips peeling off the screen, another has the screen fragment into a checkerboard and the pieces fade to white and spin around for a time. The signature viewpoint warping when you've ignited a boost or two is present, though no sound effects accompany this. These few touches don't make up for the game's overall blandness, though.
The game's main draw is that it offers speed, weaponry, racing, and some sweet implausible geometry (such as the ever-popular twisting road similar to the twisting room in Zelda OoT's Temple of Time) in one pretty compact package, but the sequel does it so much better. It's not so horrible that you will absolutely hate the game, and the levels are a bit of fun to travel through a couple times, but you won't be coming back to this one often.
On another note, I have the third game in the series as well (one of two PS2 titles I have) but haven't played it since I don't have a PS2.
Also, because I was pissed off at having a popup try to install three times when I searched out some information about XG (seems there's no entries on Amazon.com, heh), here's the cheat codes I found:
Levels and Roach (Roach = good bike):
Enter 51GG95 as your name at the
name selection screen (Contest Mode). This
gives you access to all levels and Roach.
All tracks and Roach + Neon Bikes (Neon Bikes = cool mirrored surface bikes):
Enter 61GGB5 as your name at the
name selection screen (Contest Mode).
Extreme Speed (AKA "this game is highly underpowered mode"):
Enter "xtreme" as your name at the
name selection screen (Contest Mode) and
Xtreme-G will speed up.
Race Upside Down:
"antigrav"
Stealth Mode:
"stealth"
Ugly Mode:
"uglymode," you can see what Extreme-G would look like
without mip-mapping and texture transparencies.
Very rivalry systemish according to Ken Wilson
who sent in the cheat. (oh my)
Wire-Frame Mode:
Want to know what a Color Virtual Boy version
of Extreme-G would look like? Start a new
Contest and enter your name as wired -
use no capital letters. This will eliminate all
textures and only give you wire-frames.
(hahaha)
Fisheye Lens
"fisheye"
And now...the greatest cheat in the game:
Race as a Boulder
"Extreme-G lets you transform your bike - and
everyone else's - into a rolling boulder. Start
a new "Contest" and at the bike selection screen
press R. This brings up the name entry mode.
Press R again to switch to lower case. Just enter
the word roller - use no capital letters -
and you should hear a confirmation sound. Start
the race and rock’n’roll - rock’n’roll, get it!"
Cheats ripped from here (http://www.cheatcodesgalore.com/nintendo64/showcheat.php?title=Extreme%20G)
I recently bought a copy from Neo Zeed's hopping "ClubNinja" and I now understand why the series has taken a while to catch on (assuming it actually did)! XG2 has an "arcade" mode where you can zip around the track catching armaments and blasting bite-sized baddies to kingdom come with them and your main gun; you recieve power-ups that offer various more or less useful bonuses that you can upgrade if you keep from using them immediately. Every now and then a "mothership" comes by and if you can tag that you get an extra helping of points. Your main problem lies in keeping your shield gauge filled up; if it runs down to nothing as a result of bumping into the track walls your ship explodes and it's game over. It's balanced, fast, mindless fun.
The first thing I tried out with the original XG was the shooter mode. The difficulty between various tracks seems very much unbalanced; on the first track I played I was able to destroy 60 critters after just a few runs by moving almost at a crawl and sending homing missiles (this would be the rightmost track on the map select screen, with skyscrapers in the track thumbnail; of course only three levels were open to me never having played it before). On the other hand, some maps force you to move quite quickly as homing missiles don't seem to navigate the course as well. All along there are tons and tons of absolutely useless mortar items (which look like the standard rocket "R," of course) which you might kill something with if you're right on its bumper and using a turbo item at the same time. I didn't get a kill with one of these the whole time I played and burning a turbo just to try would've been silly. What's more, you can't seem to drop a weapon with the C buttons; I think you might be able to with the L shoulder button but I'm not sure (I think I saw a bike drop a mortar in the demo...). You have to eyeball what you've picked up; aside from the homing missiles with their red "H" icon, all the other weapons in "shooter" mode have an "R" with perhaps a slightly different tint or different arrows coming off the top. There's no voice cue as to what you've picked up such as in XG2. Weapons take far too long to equip on top of your vehicle. Your main gun is very much useless nearly all of the time in this mode, which is a shame (in XG2 I could power up the main gun and let it sit there destroying enemies for me, in XG your weapon dribbles out low energy shots instead). It's nice that they let you get a variety of weapons compared to XG2's single pulse cannons, but none of the shots follow the track's curves upward and downward; unless your shots are perfectly lined up and you're traveling along a consistent grade they just hit the track and explode. Basically, shooter mode looks like it was tossed together at the last moment.
It's also amazing how bad the game looks compared to the old NP screenshots. I recognize various landmarks from the magazine's screenshots such as the big-headed ancient alien statues, but somehow the maps all manage to be very bland and their locales very indistinct. That doesn't mean that the maps aren't full of unintentional tricks, however; on the first map I played you pass through a section of what appears to be highway (with barely readable exit signs marking "Space Port") with a divider section. I must've hit the street lights in the middle of that street four or five times playing the game for just half an hour; what's more, you don't just hit them and stop but your bike tries to climb up it. That's a good five seconds wasted trying to get back up to speed.
Graphically, the game is pretty damn poor compared to Mario Kart 64 and just about every title I have on the system (aside from one of the early wrestling titles) betters it in every way. I don't think XG2 looked this bad even without the expansion pack (though I haven't tried playing without...). Textures are terrible; poly counts are so low that you can just about count triangles as you drive by, and everything's pretty straightforward. "Scenery" can be equated with "we have burning barrels along this highway, on that map we have something that looks like a steam shovel, and here we have a big sign which says "OCEAN CLUB." I like that. Ocean Club. Takes me miles away from this dreary game. One map has you inexplicably driving through a cloud of batlike creatures which might actually be your fans; while they don't cause slowdown, it is rather strange all the same. In XG2 whenever billboard sprites were used they were subtle touches to finish off an area's mood, such as the alien giraffes on the wind plains (whatever that's called, Teras Kasi perhaps?) In the alien ruins map on XG, there's a section with strange (but huge) billboard signs that actually throw off your sense of perspective. One final sin is that you never ever can go backwards...instead you seem to get sucked towards the walls. Trying to use your brake while stationary might cause you to zip forwards as well.
Music and sound effects...the game had all of two guys working on this department and it shows. The tunes are awful techno stuff, the sound effects are only slightly better and out of it all only bike sounds and explosions sound like they do in the sequel. I think everything else was scrapped, though come to think of it I didn't hear anything else except for static when I change bikes and some bouncing boulders at one point...XG2 had some nice voice work, and what's more it had a good deal of it to help you understand what was going on around you.
This game doesn't do everything horribly, though; the intro sequence is quite good (if anybody has seen XG2's opening with that terrible, horrible, grinning...THING...in the bike cockpit...you have known fear as I have), the framerate doesn't seem to dip much (heh), there's some nice frontend touches (though comparing times in time trial mode isn't one of these, as it only shows your best time afterward...) such as the fading "Press A to enter a password" scroller inside maps you haven't unlocked on the memory card, and there's some nice effects when the scene changes. In the demo there are moments where the game has two race scenes rendered at once while it cuts to another scene; one effect has strips peeling off the screen, another has the screen fragment into a checkerboard and the pieces fade to white and spin around for a time. The signature viewpoint warping when you've ignited a boost or two is present, though no sound effects accompany this. These few touches don't make up for the game's overall blandness, though.
The game's main draw is that it offers speed, weaponry, racing, and some sweet implausible geometry (such as the ever-popular twisting road similar to the twisting room in Zelda OoT's Temple of Time) in one pretty compact package, but the sequel does it so much better. It's not so horrible that you will absolutely hate the game, and the levels are a bit of fun to travel through a couple times, but you won't be coming back to this one often.
On another note, I have the third game in the series as well (one of two PS2 titles I have) but haven't played it since I don't have a PS2.
Also, because I was pissed off at having a popup try to install three times when I searched out some information about XG (seems there's no entries on Amazon.com, heh), here's the cheat codes I found:
Levels and Roach (Roach = good bike):
Enter 51GG95 as your name at the
name selection screen (Contest Mode). This
gives you access to all levels and Roach.
All tracks and Roach + Neon Bikes (Neon Bikes = cool mirrored surface bikes):
Enter 61GGB5 as your name at the
name selection screen (Contest Mode).
Extreme Speed (AKA "this game is highly underpowered mode"):
Enter "xtreme" as your name at the
name selection screen (Contest Mode) and
Xtreme-G will speed up.
Race Upside Down:
"antigrav"
Stealth Mode:
"stealth"
Ugly Mode:
"uglymode," you can see what Extreme-G would look like
without mip-mapping and texture transparencies.
Very rivalry systemish according to Ken Wilson
who sent in the cheat. (oh my)
Wire-Frame Mode:
Want to know what a Color Virtual Boy version
of Extreme-G would look like? Start a new
Contest and enter your name as wired -
use no capital letters. This will eliminate all
textures and only give you wire-frames.
(hahaha)
Fisheye Lens
"fisheye"
And now...the greatest cheat in the game:
Race as a Boulder
"Extreme-G lets you transform your bike - and
everyone else's - into a rolling boulder. Start
a new "Contest" and at the bike selection screen
press R. This brings up the name entry mode.
Press R again to switch to lower case. Just enter
the word roller - use no capital letters -
and you should hear a confirmation sound. Start
the race and rock’n’roll - rock’n’roll, get it!"
Cheats ripped from here (http://www.cheatcodesgalore.com/nintendo64/showcheat.php?title=Extreme%20G)