Time to go back two decades.
An Uncommon Geek Retrospective Review
It pains me in a way, that by own standards this is now a retro game. In the mid 90s it never occurred to me that this and other games on the original PlayStation would one day be considered obsolete.
Not this day… this day we fight! Fight for the retro games!
Sorry, unintentionally channeled Aragorn there. Where was I? Oh yes. Jet Moto. I was struck by the urge to play this game again once I had my PlayStation 3 up and running for recording. Despite being in limbo with my Mass Effect recording project, I elected to film a playthrough of this game and found myself having just as much fun now as I did twenty years ago.
Though represented by graphics that were of questionable quality even in those days, Jet Moto is still an intense, challenging and oh so fun racing game. Beyond its initial veneer of “extreme action, dude,” this title is also surprisingly sophisticated in ways that other modern games still haven’t managed to grasp.
Unlike most traditional racing games, Jet Moto is steeped heavily in a 3D physics engine that demands more from the player than simply turning right or left. Even going beyond what many motocross games have implemented, Jet Moto requires you to make use of all the dimensions in order to truly succeed.
The tracks in this game do start off pretty simply; indeed, during the opening track “Joyride” you could be forgiven for thinking that this was more of a jet ski game, i.e. Wave Raver. But, ah ha! The jet skis can hover, so water is just one element these vehicles can handle. Racing over water here is in fact the slowest way to go, as it has the highest resistance to these hoverbikes’ momentum. You go faster over sand, ice and dirt, and faster still over concrete and metal. On top of paying attention to the terrain you’re racing over, you must also keep into account your rider’s and your bike’s position in 3d space. Leaning over the nose of your bike increases stability and speed but keeps you from taking air during critical jumps. Leaning back lets you take air and get past tough obstacles like waves, but can inhibit your speed and turning. As these tracks can and often do go sideways and occasionally even upside down, you also need to lean properly in order to match yourself with the shape of the track.
This is all simpler in execution than description thanks to a rock solid control scheme. Even with the rather shoddy at times graphics, with the occasional problems of clipping or glitching, the controls themselves rarely let you down. Every movement feels fluid and natural, with each input reacting like it should. Though to be fair you are going to spend most of your time working the accelerator and augmenting this with your turbos, knowing when and where to brake and grapple is the key to winning on the twistier tracks. You definitely won’t win by just holding down x and hoping for the best.
Something else that really immerses me in this game is the art design. As you can see above, each rider is represented a very comic book-like image that gives you a quick snapshot of their personality and style. The characters come alive further on their victory screens with some well rendered art. Whoever drew these characters did a fantastic job; the hand-crafted art style here would continue on into Jet Moto 2 as well, but sadly would be replaced by some absolutely awful 3d models in Jet Moto 3.
The excellent design continues to the tracks themselves. Make no mistake, the graphics are pretty bad, but there are still some neat looking vistas, and the water looks pretty good for a PSX game. What matters most here though is the design of the tracks themselves. There are ten tracks in total spread across four different general themes. They all have great variety and challenge, with no one track feeling like a repeat of another.
The overall vibe and design of the game is enhanced even further by the sound. While the sound effects by themselves are fairly standard for a game of this era, with no real voiceovers to speak of, the music is what catapults this game into the stratosphere. Oh my, the music. To this day, it remains among my very favorite soundtracks in a video game. I still listen to it in my car (aided by the fact that you can use the Jet Moto game disc as an audio CD) and am still as enraptured with it now as I was back in the 90s. There are a few silly country tracks that go with the swamp levels in the game, but that aside I love the surfer tunes and the symphonic, guitar heavy rock that makes its presence felt in the toughest levels of the circuit. If you can’t get pumped by listening to the theme from “Ice Crusher” then I simply don’t know what to say to you.
Jet Moto is simply put my favorite racing game of all time. That’s not to say that it’s perfect, far from it. As I’ve mentioned several times, the graphics, with some exceptions, are pretty bad. There are issues with clipping. With a roster of 20 characters, there is some overlap and repetition between them, with some characters being functionally identical to each other. Having a pack of 20 riders is fun, but on the tighter tracks it feels claustrophobic and sometimes needlessly frustrating, which I’m sure is part of what prompted SingleTrac to reduce the pack to 10 in Jet Moto 2. Also, it would have been nice to have more variety for the two player mode.
At the end of the day, however, I love this game, and I have simply had a blast re-visiting it. The video below, my longplay and video review of Jet Moto, may not be the prettiest thing to look at, but creating it brought me a lot of joy.
Also, as a side note, I have decided to cease giving out scores for games, instead opting to let the review speak for itself. It was fun for awhile to pretend that I was some kind of games journalist, but in reality scores are so arbitrary and are really nothing more than elaborate opinions that can be spun into marketing tools. My final word here is that I love Jet Moto and love geeking out about it.
FIN
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