MTX Mototrax: Mac motocross mania...

Dec 06, '04 07:21:00PM

Contributed by: robg

MTX:Mototrax icon The macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[Score: 8 out of 10]

When I was a much younger person, I had grand aspirations to be a pro-level motocross rider. Unfortunately, three things stood in my way: lack of skill, lack of parental consent (they were clearly brighter than I was!), and an innate, horrid fear of breaking every bone in my body. Thanks to Aspyr, though, I can now live my dreams in the (relative?) safety of my office chair. MTX Mototrax (MTX from here on out) is, to my knowledge, the first motorcycle-based game to ship for the Mac, perhaps ever (anyone remember any?). The basic premise is that you're a budding off-road rider, and you need to work your way up through the ranks by winning races. As you win, you start earning money, attention from sponsors, getting better bikes, offers to ride for better teams, etc. You compete in three main events: supercross (stadium racing), motorcoss (outdoor racing), and freestyle (indoor trick arenas). In addition, "free ride" zones are provided where you can practice on the bike and earn more skills through a series of challenges.

As you can see from the small image at left (here's the bigger version), you can do some amazingly wild stunts in MTX. Instead of trying to describe them, I recorded a short movie of just a few of the 115ish stunts you can perform -- you can view either a small [6.6MB] or larger [14.4MB] version. There's a bit of distortion (I used iMovie to edit the clips and add the transitions, resulting in a 720x480 version of an 800x600 original), along with some obvious MPEG arifacts, but it's not too bad.

The game is highly addictive, as the winning comes relatively easy in the beginning, and the visuals are very well done (some background scenery is flatish looking, though). You can see the bike compress when it lands a jump, and the rider's body reacts to the impact, too. The sounds are entertaining, with crowd roars, a loud PA announcer, thunderous crashes, and more. There's a soundtrack, too, but I have that disabled, so I can't say much about it (I imagine it's also quite loud!). As you can see in the video, there's an on-bike perspective -- it's quite difficult to ride this way, but it is an interesting diversion every so often (especially for the backflips). I wouldn't call the physics completely realistic, but I would call them totally fun!

So what's not so good about it? Well, after the easy earlier levels, you need an 18-year-old's reflexes to really succeed, I think. My aged fingers are having trouble with some of the required gamepad manipulations for the tricks, and the pro-level riders on the supercross tracks are really tough to beat. The scripted trick sequences in the freestyle events can seem impossible, too -- leading to a lot of re-do's in order to succeed. In the career mode, a series of emails are sent to your PDA after each event. Some of these are really important, like sponsorship and team-ridership offers. But there's no way to preview what the offer from a competing team really involves, so you might trade an excellent bike for one that doesn't handle as well. The moral to that is to save, and save often -- that way, you can go back in time if you make a screwup.

Performance is generally good, but a crowded track in a well-lit outdoor track with lots of scenery occasionally bogged the frame rate a bit at 1600x1200 (lowering it to 1024x768 seems to have solved that issue). This is on a dual G5; I haven't yet tried playing it on my PowerBook, but I imagine I'll have to reduce the resolution to 800x600 or 640x480 (a 1GHz G4/G5 with a 32MB video card is the listed minimum system).

But overall, this is a really well-done game (especially considering it started as a console game). There's head-to-head networking, and you can play against the PC version as well (I haven't tested that yet). And if you want motocross action on the Mac, I don't think there's another alternative -- and at $19.95, this one's a bargain, too! Now pardon me while I venture off to practice a few more rock solids, superman one-handed grabs, and Greg's flip varials.

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