BMX XXX is Finally 18, Baby!

Welcome to BMX XXX, the shizznits that puts the sex in XXXtreme action!

So reads the opening line of the manual, and that should tell you 90% of what you need to know before reading this article. Given the fact that this extreme urban sports game leaned so heavily into "bro culture", I thought it would be fun to celebrate the fact that BMX XXX is now 18. That means it is of consenting age, can appear in porn, and can get super drunk. Except for in most of America.

In case you're not 18, or at least didn't have an Xbox, GameCube or PlayStation 2, two decades ago extreme sports games were huge. Nowadays we're lucky to get a couple of skateboarding games, yet in the heady days of the early 2000s there was everything. Roller skating, snowboarding, skateboarding and, of course, BMXing. The majority of them had a name to hook themselves onto and draw a crowd - your Tony Hawk, Shawn White or Matt Hoffman - Z-Axis had already released three Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX games. So with the release of Dave Mirra's Untitled BMX Game fast approaching, Acclaim apparently decided that it wasn't extreme enough to just have BMX stunts. Not even removing the ‘e’ could save it. What could save it, they apparently thought, was filling it with raunchy language and naked women. Dave Mirra disagreed - or rather his sponsors did - and took them to court to remove his name from the project.

This was at a time when nudity was suggestive, and the most a teenager could hope for was some bouncy physics in Dead or Alive, or scantily dressed women in Grand Theft Auto III. What you never would have imagined seeing were a woman's bare breasts, but that's exactly what you got in BMX XXX. Except for on the prudish PlayStation 2 - turns out Sony always censored more than Nintendo, who knew? Because on the GameCube and Xbox you see nipples! Gasp.

Oh, but they're not shoved in your face, you have to work for the prize by gathering the collectables and doing tasks for the random denizens of each location. Do a good job and bare breasts are yours to look at in short movies featuring the best ladies from Scores, a real stripclub in New York. Well, not every woman shows everything, but you'll at least see them in their underwear or a bikini as they sway vaguely to the music playing.

What sort of tasks were you expected to do? Get rid of pigeons that won't stop pooping on a pimp's car. Take the clowns to the clown car. Press wall-mounted switches up on top of a building to help a firefighter who can't get it up (his hose, obviously). Collect 45 lunch boxes. You know, boring, ordinary extreme sports stuff that any BMX rider does regularly.

Some of them are harder than others, and most don't give you a clear indication of exactly what you're supposed to do or where to do it. "Pick up the poodle and score tricks" is clearer than "take the prostitutes to the hotel" when you've no idea where the hotel is. If you pause you can find out what it expects you to do, but that's not always helpful. You'll probably need to grab the manual if you want to find out how to do a Superman off of a float, as the on-screen reminder will just tell you that's what you've got to do, not how or where to.

BMX XXX is not actually a bad game. Admittedly I never played the other BMX titles that came out around this time, so this is the first "action sports" title I've played that didn't have a skateboard, but I've certainly played worse games. It's rude, crude, stupid, racist, sexist and a little up it's own arse, but that's exactly what they were going for. I haven't even touched on the Asian store owner Lon Hung Koc whose voice actor says random Japanese words for his lines, as one example of racism.

The music in the game is as you would expect - Click Click Boom by Saliva, Girls, Girls, Girls by Mötley Crüe and The Magic Number by De La Soul amongst them. The weirdest choice, however, is Lapdance by N.E.R.D. There's a cognitive dissonance when you realise that the ladies that are performing in little-to-no clothing are actual strippers who worked as strippers, stripping in a strip club. One of the lyrics in Lapdance is "While the government is sounding like strippers to me, and I don't wanna hear it.", which suggests that strippers are bad. It's a very mixed message, Z-Axis.

A weird thing to note is that the soundtrack, at least Lapdance that I'd noticed, are either edited or the "radio edition", to clean them up. Also, some of the language is censored in the subtitles, but not in the voice acting. It's weird seeing what is "too far" for BMX XXX, when they've got 10-15 minutes worth of actual adult entertainers removing their clothes.

So hop on your bike, grind, twist and flip your way into some "S.I.K. tricks" (that acronym is literally meaningless, it's not an acronym), and enter the promised land - naked ladies. BMX XXX is legal now, after all, and only a few quid second-hand on PlayStation 2 and Xbox. A touch more expensive on GameCube.