Pocketbike Racer

Should you find yourself in line for a Double Whopper and bent on only purchasing one of these budget titles, Pocketbike Racer is the easy choice. While the online play is a mess, the offline content is definitely worth a run-through, as well as the $3.99 price tag. It's a shame that it had to come out that way as nothing beats taunting your opponents while riding a minibike in a chicken getup. Mario may not have anything to worry about, but the King has earned his title with this one.

Should you find yourself in line for a Double Whopper and bent on only purchasing one of these budget titles, Pocketbike Racer is the easy choice. While the online play is a mess, the offline content is definitely worth a run-through, as well as the $3.99 price tag. It's a shame that it had to come out that way as nothing beats taunting your opponents while riding a minibike in a chicken getup. Mario may not have anything to worry about, but the King has earned his title with this one.

There’s enough to like about Pocketbike Racer to warrant the purchase. Don’t go thinking that it’s going to replace Need for Speed: Carbon or anything, but it can provide for a few hours of fun, even more if you’re got an Xbox Live Gold account to play on. Even though the look of the game can’t compare to the rest of the Xbox 360 library, for under five bucks, the food you eat to get this game will more detrimental to you than actually playing the game.

Like the other Burger King games, Pocketbike Racer doesn't have much value as a game. But as a curiosity that won't be around forever, it's cheap enough and weird enough to consider adding to your collection. Heck, the ridiculous opening full-motion video, which shows the Burger King sitting on a bike while various real-world backgrounds are green screened in behind him, is probably worth $4 bucks by itself.

Pocketbike Racer is one of the three games being made available by Burger King as part of a limited-time promotion. The games are all available for $3.99--provided you also purchase some food. At a cost of four dollars, you get what you pay for, but the games do still have some inherent value, even if it's solely on an ironic level. On top of that, the limited-time nature of the deal means that these games might (but probably won't) be rare in the future. Pocketbike Racer is a Mario Kart-style racing game on tiny motorcycles that can fire a handful of different weapons. It's not so good.

While entertaining for a couple hours, there is little reason to re-visit Pocketbike Racer after the achievements have been earned. The multiplayer is only slightly interesting and vastly pales in comparison to a title like Mario Kart for the DS. All in all, the game is pretty much worthless after a few hours of playtime. Now if only I could figure out how to assign that oddball menu background to my 360 dashboard…

Unfortunately, once you remove the lovable Nintendo characters from the formula and replace them with soulless agents of advertising, you've lost most of the appeal. You're left with a slightly disturbing and shameful mockery of what was once a cherished wholesome media icon; sort of like Michael Jackson. The game is actually a competent combat cart racer and if you enjoy that sort of game, it's probably worth the paltry price tag, but for the rest of us, it's a pass.

There are a million Mario Kart clones and Pocketbike Racer doesn't do anything unique or fun enough to make it worth playing over any of the rest. Sure, it's dirt cheap and the novelty of playing as the King is there. Plus you get some goofy achievement points for your gamer card that are nice for showing off. The game is just so generic and doesn't even manage to use the Burger King license to its utmost to get some humor in there. Unless you have to have all three Burger King games, you can skip out on this one.

There are a million Mario Kart clones and Pocketbike Racer doesn't do anything unique or fun enough to make it worth playing over any of the rest. Sure, it's dirt cheap and the novelty of playing as the King is there. The game is just so generic and doesn't even manage to use the Burger King license to its utmost to get some humor in there. Unless you have to have all three Burger King games, you can skip out on this one.

The races are far too long, and tend to wear out their welcome after a lap or two. The menu music has a fun, whimsical tone, but the races are dominated by generic, grinding guitar riffs (ugh). There are tournaments to play solo and split-screen modes to accommodate up to four players. Since one friend thought the inclusion of mega-babe Brooke Burke was worth a letter grade, I'm bumping this one up to a "D-". NOTE: This game also plays on a regular Xbox, with slightly degraded graphic quality.