The word ‘simulator’ implies something about the veracity of the game it’s labelling. Certain future racing games will label up ‘Simulation mode’ and ‘Arcade mode’ to tell you which one is making a commitment to a deeper representation. BMX Simulator ought to give you the experience of riding a BMX bike, then? Well, sort of.
There is very little about BMX Simulator that is specific to the actual process of riding a bicycle. The player’s input nominally corresponds to pedalling, as opposed to pressing an accelerator, but there’s nothing in the mechanics of the game that makes that make any difference. You add speed, and you steer, and apart from the lack of gears it works essentially the same way as Speed King. The more crucial difference is in the context that you do it in. It’s not the riding of the bike that the simulation cares about, but where you ride it. Again, the place is everything.
BMX Simulator has you racing your chunky bike on small circuits, each contained within the size of the screen and viewed from the top down. It’s a model that is now much rarer than the first-person or viewed-from-behind racer, but thrived for a good while. For this case, the tracks include 3D obstacles, banked corners and such, and gates to maneuver between, as well as a competitor to race against.
One glance at the Commodore 64 version is enough to see that being able to use more than a couple of colours makes for better-looking and more functional tracks, but the Spectrum one is just about comprehensible. There is enough of a sense of uphill resistance from banked bits to make it fairly instinctive to use them for slowing down as part of taking the quickest possible route. You can become the biker with a feel for taking on rough terrain.
So you have these tight and twisty challenges to optimise, but to add to that there is your competitor. Again much like Speed King, one touch sends your rider and bike sprawling, but in BMX Simulator it feels less frustrating and more a central part of the experience. The difference perhaps is how frequently you see your opponent hit obstacles and crash themselves. This show of obvious weakness does a lot of work in providing a sense of fairness, even as once again you’re mostly racing the clock and a target time rather than really competing against your opponent. They come to feel like a fellow rider in there struggling alongside you. They are part of a simulation not of an activity, but of a way of mind.
