Reader request: XGIII: Extreme G Racing
The shift to the sixth generation of consoles brought a number of overhauls in the Extreme G formula, but they worked.
This column is “Reader request,” which should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to request a game be played and written up, leave a comment with the game (and system) in question, or let me know on Twitter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Depending on the video game consoles of your youth, the Extreme-G series is either a continuation of the F-Zero or Wipeout ethos of driving very fast in an arcade racer with futuristic settings and vehicles. The Acclaim series, originally developed by Probe, got its start on the Nintendo 64. The quickest way to market it to Nintendo fans might have been to suggest it was a cross between F-Zero and Mario Kart, in that the setting was futuristic and you had to deal with shielding and speed boosts that were tied together in one energy bar, but you also had weapons. And you didn’t go quite as fast as you did in F-Zero, either, nor were the tracks as loaded with other racers as they were in Nintendo’s most extreme racing franchise.
By the time the GameCube and Playstation 2 edition rolled around in 2001, Probe was no more: it had been renamed Acclaim Studios London, but that shut down in 2000, so Acclaim Studios Cheltenham picked up where they left off with the series, and did so with some former Wipeout devs in tow, even. While it’s still very much Extreme-G, in that you race around on a sci-fi bike with weapons attached, there were some significant changes to the gameplay and structure of the game that made it feel pretty fresh, and also gave you reason to keep replaying and improving your times and finishes.
For one, you no longer find weapons on the race track, Mario Kart-style. No, the entire setup now has you pick a racing team and a racer from the start, and then you have a career with them. As you win more races, you’ll earn credits which you can spend to improve your weaponry and your vehicle in general, which will in turn help you win more races, which will provide you with more funds to further improve your bike, and so on. You get nothing if you don’t finish at or above a certain threshold, though: the game will helpfully tell you what place you need to finish in if you want to actually continue playing, at least, so that helps you make split-second decisions while racing. Such as whether you should try to blow up an opponent, or conserve ammo and just weaken their shields so they’re less likely to use that energy on a speed boost to catch up to you, so you can still have some rounds left for another racer in front of you.
You will be making all kinds of decisions like this while you race, too: the game is not generous about refilling either your ammo or your shield, so if you’re all guns blazing and using your turbo constantly just because you have it instead of rationing for the moments you need them the most, you’re not going to find much success. You’ll find you just cannot win without using your turbo at all, too, as your opponents are going to use theirs: going all-in on your shields does nothing but help you cross the finish line with your vehicle in excellent condition and you a loser. Your opponents are also going to try to shoot you, and sometimes it’s going to make more sense to just try to boost away from those moments rather than suffer a ton of damage that is going to deplete your shield bar all the same.
There are just 10 tracks to race, but as you have six different racing teams with two racers each, and multiple speeds beginning at 250cc and ending with 1000cc, you’re going to get a lot of both physical and metaphorical mileage out of those 10 tracks. When you see the best-ever time to beat in the very first track and it takes you nearly twice as long to complete it yourself, you might think that you did poorly, but no, you just don’t have access to the kind of vehicle you need to complete a stage in under 40 seconds just yet, never mind knowing exactly when it makes sense to drive using the analog stick instead of using the L and R triggers, or when you should be pointing forward or pulling backward on the stick to improve your speed around certain obstacles, Excitebike-style.
In addition, there are also time trials to complete and an arcade mode that lets you play whatever, so long as you’ve already unlocked it, so it’s not as if you have just one game mode comprised of 10 tracks and that’s the whole game. You’ve got some freedom in how you want to play. There could have been more, sure, but it’s not a gamebreaking thing for me by any means. Especially not in 2021, when it cost me under $10 to find a Playstation 2 copy of XGIII at an indoor flea market.
XGIII actually felt a bit slow to me at first, which was surprising given I had read about how it was incredibly fast — IGN’s review of it at the time of its release in 2001 even said that it might be “the fastest racer ever created, blowing by even F-Zero and Wipeout in this respect.” Two notes on that: F-Zero GX wouldn’t release for another two years, so that is in comparison to F-Zero X on the Nintendo 64, but even with that in mind, the difference between XGIII’s early speeds and its late speeds are night and day. This thing goes once you’ve played enough to unlock those kinds of bikes. You will not lack for speed in XGIII, you just have to play for quite a bit before you get to the point where that’s true. XGIII also retains the feature where you can break the sound barrier upon crossing the 750 miles per hour threshold, which you just are not going to be able to with your basic bike.
As you can see in this video — where the sound barrier is broken around the 1:30 mark, and the game’s sounds all but cease in response — XGIII is not only about going as fast as possible:
Turns can be extremely tight and treacherous at high speeds, meaning you need to know when to slow yourself down in order to avoid taking damage by slamming into a wall, or veering off course: it is worse to be slowed down when you don’t mean to, and need to work your speed back up from almost nothing, than it is to slow down on purpose and be able to rev back up in a hurry. It’s also lighter on your turbo usage, too, since you don’t need to panic when it’s all according to plan.
There’s a bit more chaos when you’re riding those faster bikes, too — the tracks seem to be mostly empty and lonely when you’re driving around slow, which has something to do with the fact you aren’t going anywhere particularly fast and there are just 11 other racers besides you. Fewer, even, if you’ve blown up one or two with your weapons — yes, your opponents straight-up exit the race if you bring down their shields and then proceed to actually destroy the bike, meaning you have one less opponent to worry about targeting or passing you. The chaos helps, and manages to keep you focused, since everything is going and happening faster. And that everything resolves so quickly makes choosing to replay pretty easy to do when you fail. You’re not burning a lot of time if you’re failing tracks the game is expecting you to finish in just around a minute or less.
I mentioned at the beginning of this that you might have grown up in either a Wipeout or F-Zero household, depending on if you’re close to my own age. Wipeout would eventually end up on the N64 instead of just Playstation systems, though, and then Extreme-G entered the discussion and fine-tuned its formula in time to go multiplatform with XGIII, so this style of racer, while it still had its platform-exclusive elements, would start to be widely available to just about everyone. That is, until Nintendo stopped making F-Zero games after GX, and Wipeout became focused much more on remakes and phone games, and Acclaim went under with no one, as far as I can tell, snapping up the Extreme-G license from them in the process. F-Zero GX came out in 2003. Wipeout HD was the last original Wipeout for consoles, back in 2008 on the Playstation 3, and Wipeout 2048 was a Playstation Vita game released in 2012, and is the last game developed by Studio Liverpool, formerly known as Psygnosis. Extreme-G hasn’t released anything at all since the sequel to this game — XGRA: Extreme G Racing Association, which came out in 2004 for the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox — and that’s a real shame.
XGIII is still a whole lot of fun to play, and at that point in the franchise’s history, was refined enough and had enough of its own ideas to be much more than just something along the same lines of two other longer-running series with the backing of major publishers. Canadian publisher Throwback Entertainment now owns the rights to Extreme-G along with a whole lot of other Acclaim properties, but even though they made this purchase all the way back in 2006, nothing has come of it just yet.
Maybe that will change, though. Remakes of Wipeout have kept that franchise going past the demise of its developer, but it’s been nearly a decade since the last original release, and F-Zero is approaching twice that length since theirs. There is room in the marketplace for remakes or remasters of the Extreme-G titles, or a new one altogether — or literally anything in this genre of slick, fast-paced sci-fi racers —but it appears Throwback’s plan is to instead just put the originals on sale on Steam. Well, original, singular: Extreme-G 2 is on Steam, released there in the spring of 2017, but none of the other three games are available. You’ll never find me complaining about having inexpensive access to original games, but XGIII came out 20 years ago, and the final game in the franchise released 17 years ago now. Maybe it’s time for more than just Extreme-G 2 on modern platforms.
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