Good lord, Midway is at it again with another one of the worst games of all time, god save me. This time, we got ourselves a bike game, Gravity Games Bike: Street, Vert, Dirt… That’s a fucking horrible title. So this is an extreme sports game where you play on a bike and try to rank up the high score. I like extreme sports games. Tony Hawk’s Underground is one of my favorite video games ever. Yet Gravity Games Bike is a runner up for one of the worst video games of all time, so that’s going to be real fun to play. So let’s see if this game can hang with the biggest names of extreme sports or if this game eats asphalt. Also this game is not sold on Amazon. I had to go onto eBay and buy a poorly used copy off eBay.
So we get an intro, using the song “Down with the Sickness” by Disturbed. Oh, the favorite song of that one quiet kid in high school. Why is this the song you’d use? Did you have no other songs available? Anyway, after the intro, we get to the title screen, and we get to the character select. There is no character creator. Even Tony Hawk had a character creator, yet this game doesn’t, on a PS2? Oh, and if you’re expecting me not to compare this game to Tony Hawk, I got bad news for you. I have every right to when the first level is a rip off of the Air Force Building that is a common level in the franchise. So I pick my characters and start the game. Has basic goals, all ripped from Tony Hawk like get 10,000 points or collect all words in gravity. So I start moving and… oh my god, I was not expecting it to control this bad. I don’t know what I’m doing, how I pull off tricks, anything at all. Every time I go up a ramp, I feel nauseous because I can’t control my rider on how he lands on the ramp and I end up eating shit on the landing. So after jumping into free mode and practicing a big, I found out what the problem is. The analog stick moves your character left and right, but that’s it. In Tony Hawk, if you press a direction on the analog stick and then a button, you can perform a different trick. You can use that to rack up combos. And this game seems to have that as well, except the analog stick won’t do it. If you want to perform a trick, you gotta press the arrows on the d-pad on the PS2. What the fuck? Why didn’t they program that onto the analog stick, the thing most people would use first?
So with this new idiotic knowledge, I jump back into career mode to torture myself some more. And the first thing that happens, I try to jump from a ramp, I get off the ground and perform a trick to start my combo, but for some reason, the game makes me think I hit a wall and my character ends up falling face first into the pavement. I was off the damn ground when I did the trick. The collision in this game is garbage. You know what made collecting the letters in SKATE fun in Tony Hawk? They were spaced out all over the map for you to search for and perform tricks to get them. In Gravity Games Bike, they are all clumped together in one room, and good fucking luck getting them. I can’t even jump out of a quarter pipe without my character ragdolling off the bike. Even when I clearly did the thing, the game knocks his ass to the ground. My rider is fucking pathetic and falls off the bike like a child. Oh, but when I land exactly face first into the ramp, that’s okay. Every single fucking time, I input a combo, the fucking game will sometimes do it and sometimes not. I am trying to get 25,000, but it is so much harder. In Tony Hawk, I can get five times that no problem, but this game makes it feel like I’m a dumbass because, despite putting in the combo, my character just falls, falls, and falls. So by patience or because I hate myself, I manage to get all the tasks I need beaten in the first level. And here’s something, I managed to beat the level with thirty seconds left on the clock. In Tony Hawk, when you finish your tasks, you can pause the game, end your run, and still get the task completed. But in Gravity Games Bike, no, you gotta wait for that clock to count down. It’s just another annoying thing in this game. So I did all that garbage and unlocked the next level, Train Depot. And I gotta say, the level of stuff they can fit into a level is amazing. You can get three score tasks, two collections, stop vandals, stop dumpster divers, break a pinata, save a woman on the train tracks, there is so much variety…. But then my character ate shit as soon as I did a jump off the ground, so yeah, fuck the variety and fuck this game.
Gravity Games Bike is legitimately the most frustrating game I’ve ever played. Other games were just boring, but Gravity Games Bike actively refuses to take your inputs when you do them and even if you succeed, there’s a damn good chance you’re gonna hit the ground and fail the combo. Just play Tony Hawk, or any of the Dave Mirra games, or fucking anything but Gravity Games Bike. It would be less frustrating to actually go out and try to do these extreme sports yourself with no prior practice, and probably less painful.
So we get an intro, using the song “Down with the Sickness” by Disturbed. Oh, the favorite song of that one quiet kid in high school. Why is this the song you’d use? Did you have no other songs available? Anyway, after the intro, we get to the title screen, and we get to the character select. There is no character creator. Even Tony Hawk had a character creator, yet this game doesn’t, on a PS2? Oh, and if you’re expecting me not to compare this game to Tony Hawk, I got bad news for you. I have every right to when the first level is a rip off of the Air Force Building that is a common level in the franchise. So I pick my characters and start the game. Has basic goals, all ripped from Tony Hawk like get 10,000 points or collect all words in gravity. So I start moving and… oh my god, I was not expecting it to control this bad. I don’t know what I’m doing, how I pull off tricks, anything at all. Every time I go up a ramp, I feel nauseous because I can’t control my rider on how he lands on the ramp and I end up eating shit on the landing. So after jumping into free mode and practicing a big, I found out what the problem is. The analog stick moves your character left and right, but that’s it. In Tony Hawk, if you press a direction on the analog stick and then a button, you can perform a different trick. You can use that to rack up combos. And this game seems to have that as well, except the analog stick won’t do it. If you want to perform a trick, you gotta press the arrows on the d-pad on the PS2. What the fuck? Why didn’t they program that onto the analog stick, the thing most people would use first?
So with this new idiotic knowledge, I jump back into career mode to torture myself some more. And the first thing that happens, I try to jump from a ramp, I get off the ground and perform a trick to start my combo, but for some reason, the game makes me think I hit a wall and my character ends up falling face first into the pavement. I was off the damn ground when I did the trick. The collision in this game is garbage. You know what made collecting the letters in SKATE fun in Tony Hawk? They were spaced out all over the map for you to search for and perform tricks to get them. In Gravity Games Bike, they are all clumped together in one room, and good fucking luck getting them. I can’t even jump out of a quarter pipe without my character ragdolling off the bike. Even when I clearly did the thing, the game knocks his ass to the ground. My rider is fucking pathetic and falls off the bike like a child. Oh, but when I land exactly face first into the ramp, that’s okay. Every single fucking time, I input a combo, the fucking game will sometimes do it and sometimes not. I am trying to get 25,000, but it is so much harder. In Tony Hawk, I can get five times that no problem, but this game makes it feel like I’m a dumbass because, despite putting in the combo, my character just falls, falls, and falls. So by patience or because I hate myself, I manage to get all the tasks I need beaten in the first level. And here’s something, I managed to beat the level with thirty seconds left on the clock. In Tony Hawk, when you finish your tasks, you can pause the game, end your run, and still get the task completed. But in Gravity Games Bike, no, you gotta wait for that clock to count down. It’s just another annoying thing in this game. So I did all that garbage and unlocked the next level, Train Depot. And I gotta say, the level of stuff they can fit into a level is amazing. You can get three score tasks, two collections, stop vandals, stop dumpster divers, break a pinata, save a woman on the train tracks, there is so much variety…. But then my character ate shit as soon as I did a jump off the ground, so yeah, fuck the variety and fuck this game.
Gravity Games Bike is legitimately the most frustrating game I’ve ever played. Other games were just boring, but Gravity Games Bike actively refuses to take your inputs when you do them and even if you succeed, there’s a damn good chance you’re gonna hit the ground and fail the combo. Just play Tony Hawk, or any of the Dave Mirra games, or fucking anything but Gravity Games Bike. It would be less frustrating to actually go out and try to do these extreme sports yourself with no prior practice, and probably less painful.
