Control:  
The control, in and of itself, is quite good. You will find that your bike is very responsive to the control stick, and extremely super sensitive to the L and R shoulder buttons. At first, the shoulder button super-sensitivity will be hard to get used to, but the burst of sideswiping speed they provide comes in quite handy on those high-speed hairpin turns. Unfortunately, as responsive as your bike is to your controller, it will still be a terrible chore to get your wheels from one end of the track to the other once you work up enough speed. The track design and the control scheme are, independent from one another, quite exceptional. But put them together and you’ve got an annoying garble of left, right, left, right, left, right repetition that serves only to exercise your reflexes instead of stirring the competitive speed-demon asleep within you. The game is at its best when it is at its fastest. But what you gain in engine power you will lose in control, which just shouldn’t be the case in a game where the progression depends on the development of your bike’s technology.

Gameplay:  
The problem I had with the control scheme/track design mis-match is the greatest damper on overall gameplay. Let me put it like this: if you get fast enough, and I mean fast enough, the track will fade into a blur and the sound will drop out: you just broke the sound barrier. It’s a great idea! It is legitimately thrilling. I have never experienced anything in a racing game quite like it. Obviously you loose some control there because you can’t go that fast and not slip around a bit, so that’s not my problem. My problem is, instead of that being a bonus moment that you can earn through skill or crafty motorcycle upgrading, it is a moment you have to luck out on or seek independently of the race itself. I do not think that it is “too hard” to break the sound barrier--I think that the control for the entire game is so taxing that this feature cannot be properly capitalized on. Bother.

Aside from control, there is one other major problem with the gameplay: weapons and shields. This can be said quite simply: the weapons are weak to the point of being pointless, thanks in no small part to a ridiculously rapid ammo depletion problem, and despite the massive amounts of victory you have to achieve to earn enough cash to purchase even one of them. The shields (which also provide your speed boosts at their own expense) are simply exhausted too quickly once you advance to the faster stages of the game. Instead of earning money to purchase the stinking “rights” to a missile, the game should have been designed so that you could earn the money and buy the missiles themselves--and perhaps a couple of mines, maybe a few flash mortars for the road. Then you don’t have this troublesome “ammo recharging area” to slow you down and you can’t get upset when you run out, because it’s your fault for not buying more of them. Come to think of it, instead of earning money solely by winning races or beating annoying time trials records, you should be able to bet other players on little side missions, or earn money this way or that, adding to the submersive experience and making the weapons more accessible and the final races more fun. You’ve spent the past five days earning your weapons and entrance fees (with a little help from the GBA, perhaps?), now its time for the big race, etc. But now I’m fantasizing.

Multiplayer:
This is pretty cool stuff--I was impressed with the option to split the screen horizontally or vertically. The framerate is consistent, and everything has, like in the 1-player game, an overall smoothness of motion (minus the wack turns as you get faster and faster) that delights the eyes. It’s nothing outrageously fun, but it is not nearly as worthless as most multi-player options being tossed out of the processor these days.

Sound:
The music is good. The sound effects are great. The mix between the two, however, is terrible. You cannot understand a word from the announcer (which is normally fine by me, but since the poorly designed shield and weapons gauges are unreadable by color-blind people such as myself, I need to hear their warnings!) and the music is not nearly loud enough. But this can be adjusted in the game’s Options menu, as usual, and so it is not a disaster. I was particularly impressed with the subtle hum that rings when you tap into a speed burst. I like the sound effects.

OVERALL:
On a positive note--there really is nothing like switching the perspective to first person with the C Stick, and busting the sound barrier as you careen down a 90-degree angled track into a tunnel that cracks open the surface of the ocean for your racing privilege. These moments alone make XG3: Extreme G Racing worth checking out. And who knows? Maybe it is my own incompetence that makes the control situation so annoying--not difficult, just annoying--and maybe you will find it delightful. The storyline could be better, and like I said there could be more inventive ways of earning money (like replaying the previously conquered circuits with your freshly upgraded bike, but I’ll stop now I promise), and the weapons should be taken out entirely or made more effective. But geez! It is still quite fun to go super-sonic fast down a track that could only be built--much less raced upon--a century or two from now.

I could not help but get the impression that the different components of the game--the look, the sound, the control, the character design, etc.--were designed by different people in separate parallel worlds and then put together as a sort of patchwork of independently decent ideas that simply did not work together. Weak weapons are great in games were you have lots of time to use them. Jerky, hazardous control is the most fun on wide roads. Speed does not accommodate drive-by chargeups. You get my point? The game’s greatest strengths are simply not working together, not helping to create a tight little interactive experience that draws you in and keeps you in. But like Extreme G’s first two titles, it is full of good ideas. I honestly hope the kind folks at Acclaim give this franchise another shot, another opportunity. But I hope they make it easier to steer that stupid rollerskate.

 

The Lowdown on  Extreme G-3 Aesthetics: Very Good Control: Below Average Gameplay: Average Multiplayer: Above Average Sound: Above Average Innovation: 3/6 Lasting Appeal: 4/6 Overall: Average! "An Average Game"