XGRA: Extreme-G Racing Association

Defy the laws of gravity.

NA release: 24th November 2003
EU release: 5th March 2004
JP release: N/A
Developer: Acclaim Studios Cheltenham
Publisher: Acclaim
NGC Magazine Score: 71%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

The final Extreme-G game as the franchise fades out with a quiet fizzle – in fact, many people thought that the third game was the last one, and the lack of consistent naming throughout the series certainly didn’t help. While XGIII wasn’t much more than a decent racing game, it had some stunning environments, great music and wonderful sound effects to boost how it felt, leading to something fun.

Your first choice in this is if you want rock music, dance music or a mixture of both. This is a bit of a trick question as both soundtracks are abysmal, and seem to have a strange issue of not loading anything once the first song ends (so no music after a couple of laps). The sonic boom effect is much softer, losing its punch both visually and audibly. The environments are more interesting, as it’s this is set on multiple planets in the solar system, but the backgrounds just look ugly and there are no “wow” moments.

The racing itself is equally dull. Turning feels unimportant, and any sharp vertical turns in the track will grind you to a halt, it’s like the game engine wasn’t suited for a futuristic racer with twisting tracks. You’ll collect weapon tokens which scroll across your list of weapons at the top of the screen, so you need to keep collecting them until you reach the one you want to use. The system is far to convoluted and navigating the weapons menu uses multiple buttons, and not something you want to manage while racing. This is a big downgrade from XGIII, and we’ve had the amazing F-Zero GX since then.

Poor

The bikes feel too slack. Twitching the analogue stick left and right as you take bends simply isn’t satisfying enough because the bikes feel so light under your thumb that you’re never really convinced that you’re in control of a super-powered bike. It seems like a step back from the original Extreme-G and XG3.
Geraint Evans, NGC Magazine #89

Remake or remaster?

An Extreme-G collection would still be good.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get XGRA.