Recently the Nintendo64 has received its first motorcycle games, Jeremy McGrath Supercross by Acclaim and
Supercross 2000 by Electronic Arts and earlier Road Rash 64 by THQ. But two of these three were nothing
but pure crap, namely the two supercross games. So I atleast expected a lot of Hyper Bike, which I've been waiting for for quite some time now since
I've always been a fan of the Top Gear series, on the N64 atleast.
Jeremy McGrath and Supercross 2K were boring and hard to controll so I kinda feared that TG Hyper Bike
would have a similar control, but no. Yes it is a little bit hard to control at first but you soon
learn how to steer the bikes. But the game doesnt continue with the same old boring bike, after each
season you'll get two new bikes which are faster than the previous and also a bit harder to control as
you have to reach faster too, great!, although I must say I began to get in trouble in season 3 where
I needed 100 points and got 30 in the first (2nd place), no points in the second race (8th place) and
30 points in the third race (2nd place), so I needed 40 points (1at place) in the last race and I had to
use the fastest bike available, but after trying like 5 times I made it.
In Top Gear Hyper Bike you switch between two types of motorbikes, a Kawasaki cross-bike and a neato Honda
sports-bike. You ofcouce race at the cross bike in forests and so on where the mud splashes all over,
especially when it rains, hmmm. The sports bike is being raced on roads, who would use it in a hilly forrest
anyway?, where you can get some quite impressive speed. To speed up your bike there are Nitros lying around
on the track, looks like they stole that idea from Midways Super Off-Road game.
The graphics are extremely nice and the game even has support for the Expansion pak, but ummm where is the
high-res mode Kemco? the game is supposed to run in 640x250 but it somehow doesnt happen. There's a hard
pumping tune in the background while riding which will drive you insane if you do not lower the volume
a lot, shame really.
The game has the following options; single race where you, surprise only race once, a time trial where you
race against the clock a trick attack where you have to perform tricks to get the highscore and finally
the championship mode where you you need a certain number of championship points to move to the next
season. the first season is only 2 races and from the second season it's 4 races.
The game also has a track editor where you're able to create your own tracks, although I havent been
messing around with it as it looks rather difficult and dull to use.
Hyper Bike is created by Snowblind, who also made Top Gear Overdrive for Kemco, however TGO wasnt as
great an success as Kemco wanted it to be, but I guess they trusted Snowblind to make another game, ok
Top Gear Overdrive could have been worse.
All in all, Top Gear Hyper Bike is a brilliant racing game for the N64, I'd actually go as far as saying
it beats every motorbike game available until now, but who knows Nintendo's Excitebike64 might be even
better than this, and then we'll be getting a game which really kicks butt!
Overall: 94%
