Supercross 3D by Tiertex
Description: Five...four...three...two...one...Go for it! Jump off the start and go freight training into the first corner with seven other riders. Get out in front early, and you’ll have time to do nac nacs and one handers off the jumps to show off for the crowd. If you’re up for shooting the curves and hitting the whoops full speed ahead, you just might be championship material. Practice hard, and you could find yourself leading the pack on the tournament circuit. Overview: Fire up the Jag and watch one of the tracks spin around in a choppy way. The title screen is basic and sports a scratchy-lame tune. Hit a button view the game menu. Choose from: Practice, Race, Tournament, Load game and Options. After you choose a play mode, you’re off to the rider select screen. You can choose from 5 SGI-rendered riders. Enter your name, pick what team you want to race for, and even choose your nationality. The game’s graphics are give and take. Most of the texture mapping on the tracks is done quite nicely. There is little pixelization but just a bit of texture swim. So, yeah...the tracks look pretty nice. Off the track, you get to see plain colored polygons! The designers decided to throw a bunch of texture onto the crowd! I could care less if there was even a crowd in this game. You’re going to be looking at the track area while you play, not at the crowd. Also, there are two jumbotron TV screens showing duplicates of your screen. I wish they would have put more detail into the track area. If not that, just throw away the crowd textures and put a boost on that polygon count. Sometimes during the game you get a bit sick of jumping off of pyramids. The hills aren’t the slightest bit round. Triangles is all they are. This is disappointing. The game boasts SGI-rendered riders. These rendered riders don’t look all that rendered. Usually when something’s rendered up nicely, you’ll get some shine and smooth stuff. Take a look at Mercury and Grok on Ultra Vortek. These guys look nice and shiny. This isn’t the case in Supercross. Despite the lack of shine, the riders do look pretty cool. The animation is lacking, and the framerate just doesn’t cut it. If you’re looking for the smooth speed of Super Burnout or Atari Karts, look elsewhere. There is a considerable amount of chop in the game. This is most noticeable while turning. It’s not absolutely horrid, but it’s a bit disappointing. The sound of the game is sub-par. The tunes sound like midi files for the most part. Nothing like the great soundtracks you’ll hear in T2K, D2K or Zool 2. There are 2 in-game tracks. One is a Nirvana sound-alike, and the other is just plain annoying. I turn the music off. This makes the game seem less cheesy. The only tune in the game that I like on the game is the Rider Select track. This one sounds fairly cool. The sound effects are pretty cool. For the most part, they sound semi-realistic. When you jump off a jump, you can hear your engine wrap up. The slamming of your bike on the ground produces a nice sound. All-in-all, these are pretty well done. The control is a bit on the slow and unresponsive side. Making your turns will become pretty easy after a while. Pushing down on the D-pad will lift your front end up, causing you to catch more air off the jumps. Pressing up will push your front end down. This is used for landing on the back sides of hills. Everything’s carried out pretty well. The main gripe about the control is simple. Once any part of your bike goes outside the track barriers, you’re gonna wreck. If you jump off a jump at the wrong angle, there’s a chance that you’ll land slightly off the track and wreck. After playing the game for a while, you’ll learn how to avoid that stuff. After you get the nac of it, the game can be pretty entertaining. Before your races, you can tune up your bike to meet the conditions of the tracks. Some tracks are harder or softer than others, so you may need different shocks, lower or higher gearing, or different tire tread. This is a very nice addition to the game. It really does make a difference on your times. This game could’ve been so much more. With a good soundtrack, some scrapping of un-needed textures, some shiny riders, and more rounded-off hills. The game is very shallow. It reminds me of some of the eye-candy games you’d see on the PS or N64. It’s one of the last 10 Jag games, but it’s still playable.
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