Mat Hoffman Pro BMX for Game Boy color
Four in row for handhelds now. We went from GBA all the way back to Game Gear, then Lynx, and now we're heading forward a bit from there with the Game Boy Color to explore the turn-of-the-century extreme sports scene.
There were so many of these games in the late nineties and early 21st century. Tony Hawk's Pro Skateboarding was such a huge success that it created a crossover audience that grew and grew. People into extreme sports started getting into video games and people who were into video games started to follow extreme sports. As a result there were skateboarding, roller-blading, and BMXing games everywhere you looked.
As a direct expansion to the Tony Hawk goldmine, Acclaim came up with this Mat Hoffman license for the Playstation and plugged his BMX directly into the Tony Hawk game engine. Anyone could see it was Tony Hawk with a bike but it was a fun game so it did pretty well.
Despite having a decent Tony Hawk game for the GBC that could have been similarly reskinned, a different route was taken with Mat Hoffman. In 2000, Acclaim had published a little known game called Road Champs BXS. With no big name to sell it and middling reviews it wasn't much of a success, so a year later it was this game that was given Tony Hawk style challenge goals, a few other negligible tweaks, slapped with the Hoffman branding, and sent out into the world.
The most criticised aspect of BXS was its 27 tutorial stages that needed to be completed before you could get anywhere on a real stage. Hoffman still has these training levels but thankfully they are all optional. However, with two buttons and more than 50 tricks on offer you'll definitely want to give at least a few of them a look.
The levels are comprised of quarter-pipes, spines, funboxes, and rails. Unlike the free-roaming nature of these games on more powerful consoles, here everything is presented isometrically and traversed left to right (or vice versa). You can also move up and down the screen as long as you're on certain equipment, and this allows the levels to take on a degree of exploration. Key to this is the fact that you can't transition from a quarter-pipe; the designers have used them to section off zones so that an alternative route must be found to get to areas beyond them.
It's all pretty smart stuff. The animation is incredibly clear considering the sprite size and the layouts ensure that finding all the Stars or all the letters of 'T-R-I-C-K' (as you are regularly required to do) is never as easy as you might imagine for a game that operates more or less on a 2D plane.
I did a little research to see if any variety is introduced in later levels and, worryingly, it doesn't seem that there is. I had fun with the game for a while but I can't see that fun lasting for 26 very similar levels.
One last point of note is that for some reason the game didn't look too great plugged into my GBA SP. If you're going to give it a play then I suggest a GBC and good light source will make the game far more attractive. Just don't ask me why.
There were so many of these games in the late nineties and early 21st century. Tony Hawk's Pro Skateboarding was such a huge success that it created a crossover audience that grew and grew. People into extreme sports started getting into video games and people who were into video games started to follow extreme sports. As a result there were skateboarding, roller-blading, and BMXing games everywhere you looked.
As a direct expansion to the Tony Hawk goldmine, Acclaim came up with this Mat Hoffman license for the Playstation and plugged his BMX directly into the Tony Hawk game engine. Anyone could see it was Tony Hawk with a bike but it was a fun game so it did pretty well.
Despite having a decent Tony Hawk game for the GBC that could have been similarly reskinned, a different route was taken with Mat Hoffman. In 2000, Acclaim had published a little known game called Road Champs BXS. With no big name to sell it and middling reviews it wasn't much of a success, so a year later it was this game that was given Tony Hawk style challenge goals, a few other negligible tweaks, slapped with the Hoffman branding, and sent out into the world.
The most criticised aspect of BXS was its 27 tutorial stages that needed to be completed before you could get anywhere on a real stage. Hoffman still has these training levels but thankfully they are all optional. However, with two buttons and more than 50 tricks on offer you'll definitely want to give at least a few of them a look.
The levels are comprised of quarter-pipes, spines, funboxes, and rails. Unlike the free-roaming nature of these games on more powerful consoles, here everything is presented isometrically and traversed left to right (or vice versa). You can also move up and down the screen as long as you're on certain equipment, and this allows the levels to take on a degree of exploration. Key to this is the fact that you can't transition from a quarter-pipe; the designers have used them to section off zones so that an alternative route must be found to get to areas beyond them.
It's all pretty smart stuff. The animation is incredibly clear considering the sprite size and the layouts ensure that finding all the Stars or all the letters of 'T-R-I-C-K' (as you are regularly required to do) is never as easy as you might imagine for a game that operates more or less on a 2D plane.
I did a little research to see if any variety is introduced in later levels and, worryingly, it doesn't seem that there is. I had fun with the game for a while but I can't see that fun lasting for 26 very similar levels.
One last point of note is that for some reason the game didn't look too great plugged into my GBA SP. If you're going to give it a play then I suggest a GBC and good light source will make the game far more attractive. Just don't ask me why.
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