Rescued Kusoge – Join me on my quest to see nipples in BMX XXX

I was recently let go from Destructoid because I couldn’t produce enough Roblox articles to feed their SEO addiction. For a few years, I ran two weekly columns: Weekly Kusoge and By the Wayside. After the new owners bought the site, they delisted some articles, which I assume was for search engine reasons (all their decisions center around Google worship). One of mine was swept under the rug, my Weekly Kusoge on BMX XXX. So, if they don’t want it, then I’m putting it here. The timestamp on this draft suggests it originally went up on April 5, 2021. It has been edited to my current standards (not for content).

ANTHONY EAGLE’S PRO TOPLESSNESS

BMX XXX sounds like a terrible idea on paper. It’s technically a perversion of the Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX series, which itself is a perversion of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I guess Acclaim wasn’t making enough money on their sort of okay knock-offs, so they decided to add the only thing that could possibly bring them more attention: tits. BMX is, after all, the most erotic of sports. It largely consists of straddling in fancy and inventive ways.

I like breasts as much as the next woman, but this came out while I was in high school, and even to a hormone-laden teen, it sounded like a cynical attempt to make sales with controversy. Of course, this was also at a time when I was trying to maintain the illusion that I wasn’t interested in flesh of any kind, so I would have feigned disinterest anyway so no one would discover my dark, horny secret.

Now, I’m an adult, and I can explore my dark, horny interests with only minor risk of getting “the talk” from my parents. So, I’m going to take this game — one that I’m probably going to hate — and see how long it takes me to see a nipple. That is, after all, the main bullet point of this game. Also, I don’t count nipples that are visible through tops. You don’t get bonus points just because you don’t wear a bra.

GRIND AND BUMP

If you’re unfamiliar with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater formula, you basically live in a world where the walls are lined with quarter-pipes, and everything can be grinded on. People inhabiting this world are only interested in sweet tricks, and the world’s problems can be solved by doing some sort of grind or footplant on various things.

Unlike the earlier THPS games, there are no time limits in BMX XXX. Instead, there’s a health meter, and when that empties, your run is over. While you’re still alive, however, you have to complete as many objectives as possible. Completing 10 in a level moves you onto the next one. There are also competition levels which are complete hogwash. I’ll get to those because they’re somewhat important on our quest for toplessness.

You can create your own biker, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t because I don’t think there are any pros on the roster. They’re all just generic people with dumb names. Unless they are pros, and I just haven’t heard of them, in which case, I’m sorry for making fun of your stupid name, Tripledub. They’re all essentially capable of the same feats of bikery, so just make whatever appeals. I made myself, because nothing is more appealing to me than my own image with larger boobs and a nicer butt.

OFFICIAL GAPS

The main source of boobage appears to be in the movies you unlock by doing various tasks. Each one gives you a peek at a stripper, but while their gyrations are suggestive and pleasing, a lot of them are covering our quarries. The easiest movie to unlock on each level is from gathering 45 collectible objects. The other one is by finding all the gaps in a level. Anything can be a gap if you believe in yourself, so good luck figuring out what BMX XXX considers to be an official gap. Sometimes, it’s merely hopping over a flat spot sandwiched between two inclines, which I usually found by accident. Nonetheless, if that is what I must endure for a glimpse of a teat, I will do so. 

You can also get a movie by getting first in a competition, but that’s a whole new level of pain. However, collecting all the objects in a level, as tedious as it tends to be, has only provided more teasing videos. Likewise, I eventually managed to find all the gaps in the Bronx, and still, not an areola in sight. This is becoming distressing.

TURNING TRICKS

There’s actually a lot of pain that must be endured for a peek at human udders. Mainly, the game just isn’t very good. To put it charitably, it’s a serviceable THPS clone. It works at a fundamental level. However, it has more of a habit of falling over itself. The collision detection, for example, is a mystery to me. Sometimes your rider seems to bounce off everything, other times they just throw themselves to the concrete like they’re trying to get insurance money. This happens a lot with rails that can’t decide if they’re corporeal or not, but the worst instance I had was when I tried to ramp over a funbox, and my rider just rag-dolled. I then spawned on top of the funbox and rag-dolled while trying to dismount. In a competition, no less.

Yeah, the competitions. There are two of them. Remember those from Tony Hawk’s? It’s the same idea, but rather than taking the average of two out of three runs, you’re given two runs, and if you screw one of them up, then you can get bent. Worse yet, it’s not about putting on a good show, but about using the largest repertoire of tricks. So, each event is just a matter of going down a checklist and trying to hit as many as you can. Grinds, lip tricks, wheelies, and don’t forget the modify button that makes you stick your foot out for many of the grinds and manuals. That’s important. Oh, but you still need to get enough points because screw you.

That was honestly my biggest obstacle; those competitions. What sucked was when I’d get two 90+ attempts in a row, but three CPU competitors would somehow top that, and I’d have to start all over. It really makes you question how much you want to see a pair of breasts.

“HUMOUR”

There’s also the matter of the game’s humour, and I really had to resist the urge to put that word in quotes. It was released at the weird height of Jackass’s popularity, to give you an idea of what you’re in for. I figured that any title that put XXX on the cover was doomed to make a lot of offensive observations about female sexuality, and while there is some of that, the game is a lot more interested in scatological humour. You know, because that’s what you want going alongside your peepshow: poop.

I expected worse, to be honest. The first objective I got in the game was picking up prostitutes and delivering them to a brothel. There was one goal that required you to drain a reservoir so a really gross dude could get on a party boat full of “sluts” and “score,” which is pretty dehumanizing. Just because a woman is forward with her sexuality and perhaps even promiscuous doesn’t mean she just dispenses sex to anyone who climbs aboard her vessel. Even still, BMX XXX normally comes across more as juvenile than offensive most of the time. When it actually does cross over into sexuality, it’s usually just suggestive inanimate objects, bad wordplay, and, heaven help us, dogs humping.

ACCESS TO NAKEDNESS

I guess the promise of nudity worked, since I played through BMX XXX with that goal entirely in mind. It’s motivation. Eventually, I was rewarded with a video for completing the game that featured the forbidden nipple. There were also two more, one for finishing first in each of the competition levels. Hoo boy, those few seconds of toplessness were well worth all the suffering.

Or not. We live in a world where nakedness is easy to see. Nowadays, you can see boobs of every flavor with dizzying ease. The phones in our pockets can bring up flesh while we ride our bus route to work, shop at the liquor store, or sit in the waiting room for our psychotherapy appointments. It’s definitely more accessible than it was in 2002 when I was probably still on a dial-up modem and everyone wanted your credit card information.

Even in video games, nudity isn’t such a hot-button issue as it used to be. Now, we see them as a reward for listening to a character prattle on about their life story. We can choose our dick length in the character creator. BMX XXX was pushing boundaries in the stupidest way possible. It wasn’t a pioneer, it was just taking advantage of the era’s zeitgeist.

Besides, as it turns out, I was wrong about there being no toplessness in the character creator. After all that effort, I could have just edited my character, changed their top to “almost nude,” then hit left or right until I saw nipples. Unless you’re on the PS2 version, which was censored. I’m playing the Gamecube port, and it would have saved me the pain of actually playing the game. I mean, BMX XXX wasn’t horrible, it was just terribly mediocre, and the only reason I tolerated it was because it dangled its funbags in front of me. I’m only human.

This article is based on the GameCube version. It was paid for by the author.