sponsorship

Forget boring sports like football! In honor of the X Games, check out the most extreme sports and their video game counterparts .

Forget boring sports like football! In honor of the X Games, check out the most extreme sports and their video game counterparts .

For those who lament pro football's transformation from a man's game to an exhibition for 8-year-old girls and their dollies, and for everyone who believes five bowls of sugared cereal is best topped off with a big glass of Jolt Cola ("all the sugar and twice the caffeine!"), this feature with its list of hardcore game titles might only be marginally extreme enough for you. If, however, you've ever lost an eye, or lost someone else's eye while playing a video game, then your level of extremity is far beyond that of any mere piece of text.

With the coming of the X Games, GamePro.com thought it wise to take a look at some of gaming's most hardcore action sports in a most extreme, in your-face manner.

ATV Offroad Fury 4

Platform: PlayStation 2

What's so extreme about it?: The Queen Mother of offroad racing games adds MX Bikes, trophy trucks, and buggies to its arsenal.

The game: A paragon of extremity, Offroad Fury games have always allowed players to exercise their aggression by tearing up a series of mountainous, forested, or dust- and sand-filled tracks. This year's model adds 30 new vehicles to the game's already impressive list of ATVs, as well as three new vehicle types. Players can also run through a new story mode, creating a driver from scratch, and attempting to take him from schlubhood to fame and fortune via a series of races.

If the game's built-in race tracks seem wimpy, it's possible to modify themor build new courses entirelywith Offroad Fury's brand-new track editor. And players can augment their experience by sharing data with the PSP's ATV OffRoad Fury Pro, with the cross-connection compatibility allowing players to share tracks between the games, modify their vehicles, and use the PSP to access ATV-specific chat rooms and newsgroups.

ATV Offroad Fury Pro

Platform: PSP

What's so extreme about it:Offroad racing goes handheld with four-player infrastructure races.

The game: The handheld ATV Offroad Fury Pro offers many of the features of its console-bound big brother, ATV Offroad Fury 4. It holds more than 30 vehiclesagain, with a standard complement of ATVs, motocross bikes, buggies, and trucksand 64 different race courses, some of which have been plucked from previous Fury titles. Courses incorporate one of six different terrain types in their design, each with its own peculiarities: snow, dirt, mud, ice, water, and grass.

The game, however, has been built from scratch specifically for the PlayStation Portable, and an early version of the game featured an impressive draw distance, solid framerate, and solid graphics. Pro provides for four player races via the PSP's ad hoc or infrastructure mode. The game also sports five new offroad events and minigames, and is at least partially compatible with ATV Offroad Fury 4 for the PlayStation 2. Here, players can use the two systems to exchange race courses, access message- and leaderboards, and view other players'game profiles.

Tony Hawk titles

Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Wii, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance

What's so extreme about it?: Possibly the world's first extreme sports video game series moves to next-generation platforms.

The games: Technically, you couldn't call the 365 days between January 1 and December 31 a year if they didn't include the release of a Tony Hawk's Pro Skateboarding title. This year, Activision is taking its famous skating franchise to the next-generation of game platforms with Tony Hawk's Project 8 and Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam.

With Project 8 for Xbox, Xbox 360, and PlayStations 2 and 3, Activision is a brand-new game engine with a revamped physics model for all the skaters. New features such as a ball mode (where players can control their boarder's bodies during falls) and a photo mode augment the free-form play, and Activision also promises 8 holds realistic skater models as well as more in-game goals, secret areas, and missions than any of the previous Hawk titles.

Tony Hawk's Download Jam for the Wii makes use of that console's innovative controller, with players tilting and turning the remote to control a skater's movements. In addition, the game offers 90 separate challenges and both eight playable characters and game environments.

Crusty Demons: Freestyle Moto-X

Platform: Xbox

What's so extreme about it?: It's a free-style motocross game where you're encouraged to crash The game: Insane motocross riders have bartered with Satan, and given up their souls in exchange for immortality. Now, to get their souls back, these riders have to, well, crash a lot.

Crusty Demonsthe cool name is taken from a real-world stung grouptakes players across the globe in search of new venues to have their bodies pulped in: New York, Cancun, Tokyo, Texas. Players are rewarded for winning races, but moreso for doing it in a destructive fashion. Satan has a checklist of nasty things the Demons should be doing on their bikes, and completing the dark lord's list means unlocking a host of new vehicles and other goodies. Riding a lawn mower with malicious intent is one of the game's great joys, but even that pales in comparison to the simple thrill of taking a rider off a ramp and into the air, baling out at the last second to serve up what is a most appetizing Demon pancake.

MotorStorm

Platform: PlayStation 3

What's so extreme about it?:Gorgeous graphics and Havok physics make for a smashingly good time

The game: MotorStorm takes off-road racing into the next-generation, and does so with graphics that are suitably amazing. Players can compete in races with approximately 35 vehicles in seven different classes including ATVs, big rigs, buggies, dirt bikes, pickup trucks, and cars. There will also be 12 different tracks with multiple routes to explore, some of which will only be accessible to certain vehicles.

Utah's Monument Valley plays host to MotorStorm's dust- and mud-choked racing. Realistic game environments showcasing the PlayStation 3's processing power (as well as physics as done by the Havok engine) will become rutted and potholed as they're chewed up, and spectacular crashes complete with sparks and flying car parts await the driver foolish enough to take an irresistible force into an immovable object. Sony is suggesting the finished game will offer 16-player online racing via the PlayStation 3's online service, but this has yet to be etched in stone.

Stuntman 2

Platforms: PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360

What's so extreme about it?: An absolutely valid question that has yet to be answered.

At the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo, THQ announced it had purchased game developer Paradigm Entertainment from Atari. With the purchase came the news that a next-generation sequel to the PlayStation 2 driving adventure Stuntman was in the works.

Little is known about the Stuntman sequel. In fact, the only statement publisher THQ has offered on the matter is so PR-heavy as to be utterly unworkable: "The concept of pulling off the incredible driving feats of Hollywood stuntmen is a natural fit for action and racing game fans alike. Stuntman is a great complement to our growing stable of original content targeting the core gamer on next-generation systems," Kelly Flock, executive vice president of worldwide publishing at THQ said. In other words, the game is still being conceptualized, come back later for news.

Given the original Stuntman's penchant for crazed automotive feats, the sequel should be suitably extreme. The news of the sequel is enough to pique interest, but the details, sadly, will have to be left for another day.

Games.net's Countdown to...