" I would be embarrassed to be a snowboarder who is featured in this game. "

      Title: MTV Sports: Pure Ride by THQ

      Format: Extreme sports for PSX

      Reviewing Monkey: Simi N.

      The Hype: Master the mountain. Pull off mad tricks to get the highest score and win the events. Put together jump and rail combos to boost your score. And best of all design your own run with as many jumps and obstacles as you can handle.

      What This Monkey Thought...

      Graphics: Maybe it is just me, but there seems to be a recent trend with the PSX games that I have been playing. It seems like people just don't care enough to put in good graphics anymore. I mean this game looks worse than other snowboarding games that came out as many as three years before it. The mountains are very bland looking with shifting textures and tons of pop up. And the boarders yield decidedly low polygon counts and have just terrible animations. In short it is just plain disappointing. 1 out of 5.

      Sound: Well I have to say I like some of the music in this game but the tracks that I don't like I hate, its all popular rock music that you'd find on TRL. All of the music fits the game and it is cool that they allow you to choose what track you want to hear all the time. The sound effects are pretty good too. They are for the most part accurate and definitely suited to the game. I especially like the sound your board makes when you go over a rocky patch. 3 out of 5.

      Playability: Unlike many other extreme sports games, this one is not very smooth. The tricks system is severely limited, and you will find yourself doing the exact same tricks over and over again. And to make matters worse you aren't even penalized for redoing tricks, they are always worth the same amount of points, so all you have to do is find one trick that's worth a crap-load of points and do it over and over again, which gets boring as hell. The only real good thing about this is that it is pretty easy to win the events. And the other big problem is that when you don't land a jump you get slowed down a lot and often times you will find yourself in a place on the mountain where it will take you a couple minutes to get going again. 1 out of 5.

      Multiplayer and Replayability: As you might expect from the rest of this review, the two-player mode sucked. First of all there are only two modes, race and trick, and neither of them are very fun. The game looks just as crappy in two-player mode, and there is even some slowdown every once in a while. It's just not fun, like the rest of the game...So why would you play it again? 1 out of 5.

      Story/Dramatics: There is no story. 0 out of 0.

      The Verdict:

This game is kind of cool because it is one of the few snowboarding games on the PSX this is all about tricking rather than racing. The problem is that you'd think that they'd give you a huge variety of tricks to pull off and come up with a system that rewards you for varying your tricks in a run; but they don't and the game degrades into you pressing the same four buttons every time you hit a jump because that trick yields the most points. And the graphics are just plain horrible.

      The Good: Easy to learn tricks, some good music, and it has a track editor.

      The Bad: Too easy to learn tricks, not enough trick variety, poor graphics.

      The Overall Ugly: I would be embarrassed to be a snowboarder who is featured in this game.

      What it's Worth: I wouldn't buy it at all, and I definitely would encourage people to avoid paying any more than $5.00.