I beat the Season mode on all three difficulties. It took me a good hour or so to realize that you need to push up in addition to holding down the throttle to get max speed, as pushing up causes your rider to lean forward, making him more aerodynamic and, thus, adding extra speed. Once I figured that out, the game went from nigh impossible to very manageable.
The game has two modes: Practice and Season. In Practice mode, you can race any of the 12 tracks with any of the 3 bikes. Season mode has you race all 12 tracks with each bike, starting with the 125CC bike. If you place first in the money after the season, you get the 250CC bike and race the 12 tracks again. Placing first in the money moves you to the Super Bike. Winning with the Super Bike gives you the ending. In order to advance to the next race, you have to place in the top 3, with anything below making you retry the same track. Because of this, in One Player mode, it seems to be virtually impossible to not top the money list at the end of each season, as there doesn't seem to be a standard order of placing among the CPU riders, like in most racing games I've played. I only played one player mode, but in two player mode, as long as one player finishes in the top 3, both players advance. So, I could easily see neither player finishing at the top of the money list.
In addition to normal racing, you can punch and kick in order to knock the other riders down. Once you get the hang of the game, other than at the beginning of each race, this aspect will rarely come into play. When I first started playing, I thought this aspect was going to be a major part of the game, and your success would come down to it. Fortunately, it didn't turn out that way. Other good things are there is no rubber banding and the competitors will actually attack the other competitors instead of only you as well as making enough mistakes to be able to easily make up ground on the leaders. There were several races where I went from near the back of the pack late in the last lap to finishing in the top 3. There are also a couple moves you can perform during jumps that earn you extra cash for pulling them off.
The biggest negative to me is not having the track map on screen. Because you can't look down and there are several places where the jumps put you so high up that the track is completely off screen, not having the map makes these completely blind where realistically they shouldn't be.
I went in expecting this to be a terrible game and was pleasantly surprised. While it's not spectacular, it's not bad. It has a decent number of tracks. It's not overly difficult and once you get the hang of it, it should become relatively easy, even on the hardest (Pro) difficulty. Only a few tracks gave me serious trouble, with the mud puddles giving me the most trouble. It's worth a try if you can find it for cheap. It's definitely worth what I paid for it.
