Giveaway of the Day - Super Motocross

Today’s game is 44.3Mb and when installed expands to 114Mb. In case you’re wondering what makes this game so large (for an arcade game). 106.9Mb of this is due to the graphics (i.e. Meshes and Textures). The game comes with an partial installer; that is it installs to C:/Games/Super Motocross by default (you can change the installation path during the install wizard set up), but no shortcut is installed. You’ll have to create your own shortcuts. To make a desktop shortcut you just need to right click on the games executable and select Send To then scroll down to Desktop (Create Shortcut).. If you want a Start menu shortcut, please go to the game discussion forums where you’ll find a sticky thread that tells you how to create one.

This is similar to the Monster Truck Trials that was given away earlier this summer. Though we’re now looking at a trial bike rather than a truck plus the settings are different. The menus and overall feel of the game is similar. Basically you ride a motocross bike instead of a truck. You have to win a bronze trophy at very least to unlock the next level, of which there are 15 to complete, and to unlock new bikes of which there are three more to unlock (with names like Masterbike 2000, Magnum Striker and Titanium Pro). You have to win certain trophies, though I found winning the gold trophy unlocked the second bike after only one game and the third bike was unlock on the second level when I attained gold standard. The difference between the bikes is the power rating; which enables you to get up steeper hills easier, especially from a standing start. Though I didn’t realise I’d unlocked the bikes until I’d played the third level. Though winning the fourth level at gold standard didn’t unlock the fourth bike. The levels definitely get harder from level three onwards, with steeper hills to climb and gullies to jump, which if you don’t take at the right speed you won’t make. I finally faltered in my quest to beat each level on gold from the first try after the fourth level . Though I never used the nitro facility (because I’d forgotten about it, lol)

Controls:

• Roll Left – Left arrow
• Roll Right – Right arrow
• Move Forwards – Up arrow
• Move Back/break– Down arrow
• Use Nitro – Space
• Pause – Esc

System Requirements:

Operating system………MS Windows 2000/XP/Vista
CPU……………………Pentium 1GHz or higher
System RAM ………….256MB
Video RAM…………….64MB or above

Images;:

You can see all the screencaptures I took on one page HERE and a slide show HERE

Conclusion:

The handling of the bike was virtually the same as the Monster Truck nitro game that we got back in July. The only difference was the graphics. I liked the overall look of the game (apart from the odd stripes that appeared occasionally, which you can see in many of the screenshots I took), but I already have a really good trials bike emulator called Trials 2: Second Edition that is vastly superior to this game. I’ll be keeping it though for some light relief as it’s a much easier game than Trials 2, which I find almost impossible to beat. I was able to progress through 3 levels at gold standard with o second retries even though I was relatively slow. You just have to make sure you use the left and right arrows to steady yourself during the jumps (which helps to stop you over balancing)

Overall, if you don’t have any other games of this type, it’s okay for free and should give you some measure of enjoyment, but I think purists to this genre will find this too easy, the graphics a little to flung together and the game far too short. At the very most there’s an hours worth of game play and that’s if you need to repeat each level at least once or twice.

With many arcade games available for much less than the asking price I think it’s over priced at $9.95 and would be better sold at $4.50 at the most. I do like this sort of game so am rather generous with my scoring giving this a 5.5 out of 10 for the physics aspect of the game.

I’ve posted this review with some changes in the Forums . you can see some of the screenshots rather than links to click, which is much better IMO.

Other useful information:

Music:

There are four MP3 tracks that you can replace if you don’t like the menu and in game music.. All you need to do is go to C:\Games\Super Motocross\\Data\Music; select the four MP3’s you want to use from your collection and rename the four files you use to Level1, level2, level3 (no spaces) and menu.

———————————————————————————————————————-

Other Games:

You can get a reasonable quad bike racing game called ATV Quadro Racing HERE It’s available free from Gametop.

Just a note of caution about Gametop. The site now has a yellow rating with Site Advisor. Some of their games do try to install toolbars and hijack your browsers home page, but both can be avoided by making sure the boxes are unchecked during installation. The site also seems to have ramped up their pop ups, so make sure your pop up blocker is active if you want to avoid those annoying pop ups. Once the games are installed you will get the sites home page opening up when you shut the games down, but there is no in game advertising and effectively you’re getting free commercial arcade games

Another free bike racing game called Moto Racing (which I think is better than the one being given away for free today), can be downloaded from HERE, though it doesn’t have the physics emulation that Super Motocross has. Monster Truck Trials the previous giveaway that is similar to today’s game giveaway, is also available for free HERE, though it’s had a name change to Monster Truck Challenge.

Here’s a couple more online trials bike games that can be played full screen called Bike Master, which you can find HERE and Trial bike Pro which you can get HERE.
If you don’t mind paying for your games, you can get a couple of excellent 3D Motocross games (that are rather old, but still look good and play well) called Motocross Mania and Motocross Madness 2 that allow you to move around a vast open world, and have several different modes of play. You can pick up either of the games below for less than todays giveaway if you look for them on the net. I’ve seen Motocross Madness 2 (the better of the two games) for less than $5 on Play.com, though you may have to buy a second hand one.

Okay.. I didn’t read the whole text…