Advertising Blurbs
www.nintendo.com – Nintendo 64:
The latest entry in Kemco's Top Gear series drops two wheels and picks up a face-flattening burst of speed. This time it's all about motorcycles, from pavement-shredding Kawasaki sports bikes to mud-flingin' Honda dirt bikes.
Kemco's N64 Top Gear series began its racing career with unforgiving realism in the gritty sim Top Gear Rally. Rally 2 followed suit, but Top Gear Overdrive broke with this tradition to deliver Nitro-powered arcade action. Like Overdrive, Top Gear Hyper-Bike is more like a Schwarzenegger thriller than an ESPN documentary.
As soon as you start the very first race with the game's weakest bike, an incredible sense of speed back-slaps your face faster than Dolemite on a bad day. Hyper-Bike is focused more on fun than on physics, so expect to find plenty of Nitro Boosts planted on every track. Adding to the arcade action, shortcuts-a-plenty are everywhere. As long as you hit the designated Checkpoints, there is no penalty for taking your bike through barricades and over ravines to shave some seconds from your time.
To succeed in Top Gear Hyper-Bike, you'll have to wrap your driving gloves around a variety of different bikes. The Championship Mode presents a mixed challenge of both street and dirt races, organized in multiple racing seasons. If you finish a season in first place, you'll unlock new tracks and more powerful bikes.
Regardless of how you finish a race, you will always begin each competition in 12th place. Depending on how many shortcuts you discover, it usually takes the full three laps to work your way to the front of the pack. Although the races are challenging, a generous point system and the ability to re-start races at any time make it too easy to dominate Championship Mode. Still, the road to victory is a total blast.
In all, Hyper-Bike features 12 dirt tracks, nine street tracks and 16 motorcycles waiting to rip up the road.
Hyper-Bike's Trick Attack Mode lets you execute amazing aerial stunts on any of the game's dirt tracks, or on three motocross tracks designed specifically for big air. The game lets you yank 15 puke-worthy stunts, including cliff hangers, side saddles, spread eagles and lazy boys. An in-game tutor provides instructions on how to perform each of these tricks.
A behind-the-bike view makes it difficult to get a good view of these cool tricks, but after the Trick Attack you can admire your work in an instant replay. High scores for each track can be recorded to a Controller Pak, taken to a friend's house, and appropriately rubbed in his or her face.
In addition to a Time Attack Mode and Single Race Mode, Hyper-Bike is equipped with a Track Editor that guarantees that you'll never run out of new courses to cruise. The Editor uses a simple interface, and it will immediately inform you if your design is flawed. Your most wicked tracks can be saved to a Controller Pak for instant access at any time.
You won't have much time to admire the landscape as it flies by, but if you lay off the throttle you'll notice detailed backgrounds and creative course design. An incredibly speedy framerate makes you feel like you're flying, and ensures that the graphics don't suffer when you're doing 225 mph through the Swiss Alps. We recommend using the N64 Expansion Pak to take advantage of Hyper-Bikes crisp hi-res mode.
Thanks to the game's focus on arcade action, the developers at Snowblind Studios were free to create a game that is easy to play. Steering is a breeze, and braking is only necessarily on the most advanced tracks. The only problem we discovered was anticipating corners, and that was due to the game's above-average sense of speed.
Top Gear Hyper-Bike faces a lot of stiff competition in the extremely hot motorcycle racing genre, but it is the only game that features both on- and off-road racing in one Pak. This, combined with solid graphics and superior speed, make it a strong challenger for the two-wheeler trophy on Nintendo 64.
Contributed by Evil Ryu (31481) on May 15, 2005.
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