About a week ago, I was struggling to make a commission logo and my normal music wasn't working. Music is my life and tends to drive my creativity and really puts me in "Design Mode", but no avail this time. Well I guess its time to switch it up, let's jam to some metal/rock like so many of my online friends do.
After a little bit I found myself rockin' with it, but little did I know how that was going to go from 30-100 real fast. Playing through the YouTube playlist comes Headstrong, an absolute banger from my childhood, specifically coming from one game. . .
YES! This amazing piece of artwork called MX Unleashed by THQ was one of the main embodiments of my sprouting gaming career. The mechanics and artwork (at the time) was beyond perfect and took over many hours of my younger self.
The racing and customization was great, playing the career mode was fun and left me playing way beyond the campaign. The replayability on this is still trumping most other games I've played even now which is pretty unique since its a decently linear game, race, unlock and collect.
Freestyle mode was ludicrously addictive. I remembering sitting and playing this downstairs crisscross on the floor waiting for my mom to call me up to eat dinner, and just loving every moment except dreading the imminent call from her.
This mode was a open map where you can just drive around and do tricks hitting ramps. This doesn't sound like much, but I promise this was something I wish everyone was able to experience. Now is where the song Headstrong by Trapt comes in play, this song was in the game playlist and the iconic song for the whole game in my opinion. I am not even joking or being dramatic when I say this was the song I would replay over and over for hours while imagining the rider was myself in real life.
Tricks were the fuel that drove me into playing for hours, for how young I was, compound tricks were hard but left tons of room for improvement and looking like the coolest MX Freestylist out there.
Back in the day, being able to do a double backflip cordoba was like one of the coolest looking tricks in the game.
This link here will show all of the cool tricks the game had for you to perform out on the track.
Freestyle mode also had some other extras that I purposely missed out for this paragraph here. The single biggest reason this game was liquid gold to me was the rare things added into the map.
To begin, the semi in the background actually drove around and their were different variations of it so that you can do tricks or just ride the ramp around. Oh and that monster truck? Yeah... you can drive that. Man I might just download an emulator to play this one more time, starting to really persuade myself in this post.
Until next time...
