MX World Tour Featuring Jamie Little Review

With an already crowded field of motocross and dirt-racing games cluttering up this generation of console games, how does a dirt-bike racer set itself apart from the competition? In the case of MX World Tour for the PS2 and Xbox, the answer seems to be employing the extreme-sports personality Jamie Little to appear on the cover and provide minimal voice-over work. And that's about it. MX World Tour is a clunky bargain-bin racer that simply doesn't do enough to keep you engaged, no matter your level of motocross enthusiasm.

The best part about MX World Tour is the outdoor SX courses, which are fun, fast, and easy to learn.

Racing games live and die by their controls, and MX World Tour has controls that, if not outright killing the fun, at least put it in intensive care. Steering especially can be a chore, as the bikes alternate between far too twitchy when approaching jumps, to unresponsive when making your way around tight sequences of corners. You can swing the end of your bike around on the tighter corners by tapping the brake button when turning, but more often than not you'll end up oversteering or, worse, spinning the bike completely around. It's a frustrating system, especially considering that you need to take jumps in as straight a line as possible to maintain maximum momentum when you land. We liked the Xbox control setup more than the PS2 setup, if only because using the right trigger for gas feels more natural than the X button on the PS2 controller.

The types of gravity-defying leaps that have become standard in many motocross games are in full effect in MX World Tour. Compressing your jumps by pressing a button and then letting go at the lip of a jump will give you an extra boost, but the actual effect feels hammy and unsatisfying. Even if you make a bad landing, for example, and your rider struggles to stay perched on the bike seat, you can usually make a compressed jump even without much speed built up. While you can swing your bike left and right in midair to make corrections, the twitchy controls mean you'll often find yourself overcorrecting and landing at an extremely odd angle. Therefore, your best bet is to hit a jump in as straight a line as possible and forget midair corrections.

While it's unfair to say that it's impossible to crash in MX World Tour, it is very, very difficult. Only the most violent of landings (such as planting your bike on the uphill portion of a jump) will cause you to take a spill, and unless you plow directly into an opponent, you typically won't lose control, no matter how much jostling you do with the computer-controlled opponents. It could be argued that this was a design choice intended to keep you in the race no matter how sloppy your driving, but it just doesn't feel right, especially when you consider that you can land directly on the safety pads that line the supercross tracks with no ill effects. The biggest exception to this rule is when running head-on into the safety pads, which will toss you violently from the bike even at relatively modest speeds. In all, the collision mechanics in MX World Tour feel slapped together and not at all cohesive, even for an arcade racer.

Grab some air and pull off a number of oddly named tricks.

The sparse set of modes includes standard races, where you can choose to run either an exhibition race or exhibition series or start an entirely new career. In exhibition mode you can set the track location, number of laps, difficulty level, and the number of opponents on the track (up to a maximum of 12), and the game also includes a customization tool that lets you edit your created rider and bike, though the amount of flexibility in this tool is limited to a few preset items and upgrades you earn in the game's career mode. There's also a quick start race mode, which, as the name suggests, pops you into a race immediately with minimal setup.