huge bmx xxx fan excited to play it for the first time. no but fr this game has lived inside my brain since i was like 13 bc some youtubers i was into at the time played it. that video introduced me to taking back sunday bc cute without the e is in this games soundtrack and i think that's ruined my brain permanently bc 70 percent of everything i listen to is some flavor of shitty emo music.

anyhow this is like rlly good and rlly fun but also so incredibly cruel and nasty in a way that i understand anyone turned off by this. but idk i grew up on like jackass and stuff like that and i think what captured my eye even as a child watching shows like that is seeing smth similar to the town i grew up in on the television screen in a pre youtube getting rlly big type of world. and bc i grew up on stuff like that i'm naturally very into the aesthetics and vibe this game is going for. but it's like genuinely such a mean fucking game, like the soundtrack is rlly rlly good and i'm big into most of the songs on it but they're such small minded and petty AND misogynistic ass songs. even the stuff that's a little bit more fun and not emo/alt metal are like rude songs, that sublime song is actually so gross. there's a weird system at play here that i haven't seen in similar games, this completely ditches the time limit type restrictions in favor of a real health system, when ur health goes all the way down by failing a trick u get kicked out of the level. reminds me of like the fascination america had on young people getting hurt, this was present in news at the time of course but it's also how mtv and similar channels managed to stay afloat for the better part of a decade.

this rlly wants to be a satire of corporate greed in a post 9/11 world and tbh often i was charmed by how heightened everything felt, like a less biting gta but still way more than like the underground tony hawk games. occasionally there's rlly smart stuff here, the ramps made out of rockets w american flags painted on them is a nice little touch. the world the game inhabits is very often cold and hostile and i think that makes a lot of sense for where the culture was at the moment and where it would end up going. npcs are like fucking mean in this, everyone hates u and maybe they should lol. often though the game is kind of just racist and sexist and filled w gross out humor which yeah it is a shame.

levels feel rlly wide and expansive and every ramp and rail connects in a way that's kind of rhythmic? but mostly i'm just rlly impressed by the locales they picked. usually in stuff like this you get major metropolitan cities or fake ones loosely based on one that don't rlly have any thematic tissue, but this goes for either smaller cities like syracuse or tourist trap cities like vegas. and they all have their own visual identity even the skate parks or vague ideas of places like a dam. when i was a teenager and i watched the video of this game i always thought the layout of the bronx level looked similar to my hometown, i didn't live anywhere close to ny but the feeling of it rang true. it looked like my city and that resonated w me and i do think stuff like that is rlly important.