This game is also tough to look at, with poorly rendered racers, and arenas and crowds that might as well not be there. To show speed, bitmapped splatters of brown are tossed about, representing the dirt thrown up by tires. Nothing breathes excitement into a game like poorly rendered, splattered mud. While the tracks themselves are nice, there are too few track textures, so each section of a race ends up looking and feeling just the same as the last.

Physics aren't consistent with terrestrial experience. Almost any jump will get you big air, as if gravity doesn't exist when it comes to audience expectation. While in the air, you can see the speedometer slow down and speed up depending on your place in the arc of the jump. Even the game knows it's not conforming to reality. Then there's cornering. In Jeremy McGrath, the strategy for taking a curve requires you to accelerate the whole time. In the real world, if you accelerate a motorcycle while in a turn, your rear wheel will lose traction, and your body will be required to make up for what's lost. Also, invisible force fields mark the boundaries of the course at all times, so if you don't want to bother steering for a while, just use the force... field.

In general, sound adds to the great lack of excitement. The music is generally weak with a few exceptions. Motorcycle engines sound like two bored studio bees that had to be prodded near the stinger to simulate acceleration. The crowd sounds like it was ripped straight out of a baseball game, and the announcer sounds like he's speaking through a tube of old Christmas wrapping paper. Each time your bike lands from a jump, it sounds like someone punching a bag of cheap flour. Yawn and yawn again.

Lackluster and boring are two words you would not think to combine with supercross, motocross or even motorcycle. But Acclaim, master of some of the most bland sporting titles in the world, has managed to do it again, bringing to a hungry gaming audience a game that has all the challenge of a peg-and-hole board and all the excitement of a bowl of plain oatmeal.