Posted by Ryan Johnson on 05 20, 2010

Motocross Challenge

Categories: Games, | 3 comments | |

I can’t even begin to explain to you how much I loved playing Excitebike as a youngster on my Nintendo. For me, nothing came close! Now you can relive the glory days with Motocross Challenge. This 2D style racer created by DHG Games Inc. offers up a familiar unidirectional side-by-side racer that includes many of the obstacles, jumps, and slow patches that we came to love back in the 80′s. Sprinkled in are a few new school extras like online muli-player game-play, 8 different bikes, and up to 8 freestyle tricks that you can bust out on the competition.

Motocross Challenge has multi-purpose game controls. Using up-down arrows you navigate around the screen to catch big air on jumps and to avoid competitors, mud pits, and obstacles. While in the air touching the up-down arrows fire off tricks which is pretty sweet. Be careful though because I found myself trying to use the arrows to stear my racer in mid air and all that does is cause you to wreck. The A and B buttons serve as your accelerants. The B button is the accelorator and the A button turns on the rocket boost. In addition to the arrows and button controls you’ll notice a level on the top of the game screen that helps you keep your motor bike steady. Tilting left lifts the front wheel up and tilting right pushes the front wheel down. At first you’ll probably want to try to keep the level centered at all times otherwise you’ll probably find yourself spending more time crumpled up on the ground than racing toward the finish. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it though it’s pretty sweet to tilt back and pop a wheelie as your cruise past other racers.

Motocross Challenge comes with a decent tutorial, a bunch of diffent race tracks and races, and really fast online and multi-player game modes. Up to four racers can be on a track at any given time. That doesn’t sound like much, but givin the relatively small gaming surface and the amount of mud pits and obstacles it’s surely enough. So far I’ve completed roughly half of the one-player races, all of which I like, but for the most part I find myself going back to the multi-player game modes most. Sometimes multi-player online games take a while for you to find enough people to get a game going, which can get annoying. That’s not the case with Motocross Challenge though. It literally only takes seconds to get a race going and once it’s over it only takes a few seconds to get another one going with all new peeps. I’m really liking that action.

Overall, Motocross Challenge definitely won’t blow you out of the water with it’s graphics and sounds, but it’s certainly 100% worth the $0.99 price point. It comes with 10 different tracks, 30 different events, 8 bikes, 8 tricks, and multi-player game modes where you can play with your friends or against other online gamers. The only things that kept me from giving this app a 5 Finger Rating was that it’s clearly an Excitebike clone, and it happened to crash on me a couple times while playing. Those things are really minor though compared to the entertainment value you get out of the app. If you’re into racing games you’ll definitely want to check this one out. If you’d like to take it for a free test drive make sure to download Motocross Challenge Lite.

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