Matt Hoffman Pro BMX for the Sega Dreamcast

I was a big fan of the first few Tony Hawk Pro Skater video games and recently discovered a Matt Hoffman BMX game for the GBA. This Dreamcast version of the Pro BMX game is pretty much the same kind of game as THPS, but not nearly as fun. In a nutshell, Matt Hoffman Pro BMX for the Dreamcast is like a buggy version of THPS, but on a bike instead of a skateboard.

I’m not into the BMX stunts and all that, so I really don’t know who Matt Hoffman, or any of the other riders in this game, are or what else they do. They do have guts for getting on those ramps and flying up in the air like they do, I’ll give them that. In this game, you play a BMX stunt rider going through the circuit. Each level in the game requires you to complete various goals before you can move on to the next level. The goals all revolve around earning X number of points, finding pieces floating around the board, and somehow interacting with various objects on the board. Each level has two or three relatively easy goals and the rest are pretty tough. This is the kind of game where you have to play the levels over and over until you commit them to memory before you can really get anywhere.

The controls are pretty smooth and work like a fighting game where you have to learn all the trick combos if you really want to succeed. To score points, you can get onto a ramp and go back and forth catching more air and doing airborne tricks. While in the air, you can do as many combos as possible before you come back down, but unless you land properly, you lose all the points. In the THPS games, I got pretty good and grinding on rails and going all around the board. When you grind/slide on top of a role, you can jump and spin and keep going and the combo score can rack up pretty quick. I think once you get the hang of grinding and landing properly, you can amass some pretty big scores very quickly.

Your rider moves pretty well most of the time, but if you land backward, it seems like forever before you can get going again. I also noticed that if you run into a wall, it is hard to get your character to turn around properly and it delays the game. Each level is on a two minute timer, so even a five second delay can hurt you. What you’re supposed to do is press and hold a button to pedal and gain speed, then let off right when you reach the top of a ramp in order to jump. If you do this back and forth a couple of times between opposing ramps, you can just about jump to the ceiling.

The graphics are pretty good when they work, but therein lies the biggest problem with this game. The levels are designed with a lot of tight spaces and oddly placed ramps, and the camera often moves overhead when you land. The problem this creates is that with an overhead view, you can’t see enough of what is in front of you and it makes it very difficult to keep moving. I also noticed several times where I’d land in a dark corner where everything was so black I couldn’t see which way out. Just about every level had a couple of dark areas like this. In the first level, I actually had my bike get stuck under a rail and it took a full minute before it finally got out of there. These kind of buggy problems really take a lot away from the game.

Just like other games of this genre, the music is an actual soundtrack of various punk, metal, and rap groups. The sound effects are okay, but sound a lot like the THPS games; almost exactly alike. You’ll get tired of all the grunt effects when you fall of the bike, trust me. For the sound in general, the music overpowers most everything else.

Matt Hoffman Pro BMX for the Dreamcast is a good game, but it could have been a lot better considering it was based off Tony Hawk Pro Skater. This game suffers from control and graphics bugs, and they’re enough to take away some of the fun.