The original Extreme-G arrived on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, quick and sure on the heels of Psygnosis' similarly styled WipeOut and WipeOut XL for the PlayStation. While the futuristic N64 racer may have been a pretty obvious WipeOut clone, it held its ground, offering fun gameplay and a high-tech techno-enhanced racing theme that was introduced, but not thoroughly exhausted, by its PlayStation counterpart. Exactly one year later, Acclaim offered a second helping on the N64 with XG2, and the magic was gone. The game was fast and furious but possessed a number of significant flaws. Now, nearly three years later, the franchise has reared its head on the PlayStation 2 in the form of Extreme-G 3, and the revival has turned out remarkably well.
In Extreme-G 3, the song remains largely the same as before, albeit much better produced: You live deep in the far-flung future where you have to race high-speed cycles up and down walls and shoot energy blasts at people for kicks. Unlike in the WipeOut series, there aren't numerous power-ups to pick up over the course of the race. Instead, there are two types of energy-recharging fields that you drive over for power: one for weapons and the other for shield energy. Weapon energy powers whatever weapon you currently have selected, and when that energy runs out, none of the items in your arsenal will work. Shield energy is of particular use since it also powers your turbo boost. That means that if you get shot or bump up against a wall, the energy will be partially depleted and you won't be able to peel out on a straightaway as successfully as you'd like. It also means that if you want to go really fast, you're going to run the risk of your shields completely failing and having your cycle blow up. It's this sort of constant hairsplitting give and take that makes Extreme-G 3 so entertaining.
