BMX XXX | DJcube

This is BMX?

NA release: 25th November 2002
EU release: 6th December 2002
JP release: N/A
Developer: Z-Axis
Publisher: AKA Acclaim
NGC Magazine Score: 48%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

BMX XXX is an infamous game that marked the end of Acclaim. While this was in development, Acclaim were struggling, especially in the extreme sports category due to so many people (themselves included) making sub-par clones of Tony Hawk’s games. So Acclaim’s big idea was to make Dave Mirra 3 full of vulgarity and nudity, eventually causing all the professional BMX riders to disassociate themselves from the project.

The thing is, this was not done well at all. There’s topless women, swearing and some poop and fart jokes, and that’s really all there is. It’s a teenager’s version of rude and vulgar, with absolutely zero humour to turn it into something that could actually work, and your main goal is to unlock some stripper videos so you can glance at a few seconds of live action boobs. One interesting thing is that the North American PS2 version censors this, and removes the fully topless option from female riders (as well as the boob size slider), and the Xbox version makes the topless riders unlockable. The GameCube version, however, has the topless options unlocked from the start – it’s the least censored version. Not that amounts to much, as anyone you make in the character creator looks deathly ill.

The gameplay also takes a massive nosedive. Everything feels unreliable and unresponsive, with your character not latching on objects properly and everything looking glitched. There’s a new move that lets you do a stationary move on rails, which just means that if you approach it at the wrong angle, you won’t perform a grind. The levels are all boring with no flow to them, and the missions are immensely dull. It takes Tony Hawk’s 4 structure of openly roaming levels and finding missions, but the missions do an awful job at showing you where you need to go to complete them, and you often have to restart multiple times just to figure out which direction you need to head in.

If BMX XXX was actually fun to play and was funny, then the crass nature of it might have actually worked. However, it ended up being in a strange middle ground where its content will put off some people, but doesn’t go far enough to actually attract the audience it wanted. There have been some over the top adult games that are interesting to look back on (like Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties), but BMX XXX is not one of those games – the main interesting thing about it isn’t its content, but how it killed a publisher.

Poor

And what a let-down it was. About ten seconds of some fully-clothed girl grinning at the camera, before the whole thing cut out and we realised we’d have to complete task after tedious task to get anything worth seeing. Even then, it’s no more XXX than something you’d see on a Sunday afternoon on Channel Five, and when the game is just a sub-standard rehash of Dave Mirra, we’ll give it a miss, thankyouverymuch.
Martin Kitts, NGC Magazine #76

Remake or remaster?

No.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get BMX XXX.