There are six events in the game. ALL of them are XTREME! There’s snowboarding, but not just regular snowboarding — XTREME SNOWBOARDING! Players whip down the mountain, grind a few rails, hit a few jumps and do a few lame tricks. Then there’s mountain bike racing — XTREME MOUNTAIN BIKES, that is! They’re similar to regular mountain bikes, but louder and with less agility! It’s similar to steering a collection of lead pipes through a dirt track while trying to do a bunny hop. There’s also XTREME SPEED GLIDING! You fly through the air and attempt to avoid big balloons. Then you can jump on an all–terrain vehicle for some XTREME ATV RACING! And XTREME BUNGEE JUMPING! And XTREME SKY SURFING! Plus, you can punch the other racers in the face... whoa!

Xtreme Sports’ cutest feature is that the player doesn’t simply compete in one event and then move on to the next. This is no California Games, monkeyboy, this is Xtreme Sports. After players swoosh down to the bottom of the snowboarding run, they need to bang on the DC’s buttons with xtreme speed to make their athletes run over to the speed glider or ATX or mountain bike. Xtreme Sports mixes wacky extreme sports events with Iron Man–style endurance tests. I’d call it a triathalon, but some of the later competitions roll four or five events together.

It’s more of an Iron Man for your thumbs, really. Each of the different events is decent, not great. But when you consider that there are six different games, most of which are wildly different from one another, you have to give kudos to Innerloop for being able to crank out a game that lets you tumble through the clouds attached to a sky board, bungee off the side of a bridge and jump over moguls on a snowboard. As I’ve come to expect from Dreamcast titles, Xtreme Sports is pretty to look at, but unlike deeper sports games, the game is only solid for about 10 to 15 minutes of play time before you’ve just had enough. It’s not that Xtreme Sports is a bad title, it’s just that (as is the case with so many other Dreamcast titles) it’s an xtremely short game. There’s really not much to the game to compel players to goof around with it by dedicating more play time. Two of the sports — bungee jumping and sky surfing — are locked, which forces the player to go through the competitions in order to open them, but the payoff isn’t necessarily worth the xtreme effort.

What really pushed me over the edge in terms of not liking this title is the fact that the button schemes seem to change radically from event to event. This can be confusing, as the player switches between them in the middle of a challenge. Also, the player needs to do tricks while racing in order to boost speed and earn those critical points, and the entire trick system is almost counter–intuitive. Attempting to bunnyhop on the ATV requires the player to press "UP" twice on the controller, followed by the "TRICK" button. A back flip on the mountain bike is done by hitting "LEFT", "UP", "DOWN" and the "TRICK" button. Where most "extreme" sports these days are making tricks more comprehensible to the player (Tony Hawk 2’s trick system is the best example), Xtreme Sports seems to have gone out of its way to be as obtuse and Tekken–ish as possible.

At last, here’s a game that lets you live out your fantasy of becoming, at least digitally, one of those xtreme dudez from the "Do The Dew" commercials. And, like a Mountain Dew commercial, the fun ends after 30 seconds or so. Pretty, but shallow.