As much as I like to bitch and moan about the games that are often pawned off on me, getting the dregs of the review pile is part of a freelancer's job description. However, on very rare occasions, playing the stuff that most people would just pass off as instant crap can sometimes end up exposing you to something surprisingly fun.
Unfortunately, Mountain Bike Adrenaline falls squarely into the "crap" category, but even as I bumbled through the game's clunky, unintuitive menus and regularly found my xtreeeem mountain biker getting high-centered on various little rocks or riding straight up tree trunks, I couldn't help but feel like the game could have been rather neat. Sure, it would need a far bigger budget and likely a much bigger development team, both of which are almost always the antithesis of a $15 game, but still, there's actually something to the basic design here.
That design is throwing six riders down four different mountains on a handful of licensed bikes from companies like Cannondale and Kona, and, uh, putting helmets on them. Along the way, they can feebly jump and spin their bikes while doing a whopping four horribly animated tricks. The collision is horrid and some of the challenges are as inane as they are impossible, but the game can actually muster a decent sense of speed in the later courses and, as bad as it looks, certain things like low-hanging, foggy little pockets of mist actually look good.
Again, it's little things that perk up from time to time; maybe it's a particular path that guides around corners juuuust smoothly enough to send you hauling ass down the mountain on the way to the next checkpoint during the Stopwatch Mode, or catching a speed boost in Challenge Mode. Sure, most of the game is an excruciating dance of restarts and cheap falling deaths (tipping over backwards is often a "fatal fall" according to the game, but plunging headlong into a pit of lava is just a normal fall), but parts of the game, given a little more love, could have worked
MINIMUM
Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Pentium III or AMD Athlon 800MHz Processor
256MB RAM
2GB Hard Disk Space
Nvidia TNT2, GeForce 1, 2 or 3, ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500 or 8500, or Matrox G450 Video Card
DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9
MAXIMUM
Windows 7/Vista (32 or 64 bit)
Intel i7 Quad Core 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent
3GB System RAM (High)
30 GB Hard dDisk Space
nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX / ATI Radeon HD4850 Video Card
Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live
DirectX 9.0 - DirectX 11
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