Not as good as first port for Playstation.

Road Rash is a very, very old game. We were first introduced to this off-beat racer on the Sega Genesis, and three versions of that game have been made for the Playstation. While Road Rash Jailbreak is a fine game, it doesn't much improve on the original Road Rash for the Playstation. To make matters worse, this game has so many bugs in it that I believe Bill Gates must have been involved somewhere in its development.

For those who don't know, the "Road Rash" concept is pretty easy. You drive a motorcycle at unreal speeds and fight opponents along the way. So, that's the concept in a nutshell -- speed and violence. This simple formula makes for a very fun game, and it still holds up in Road Rash Jailbreak.

This game is way ahead of Road Rash 3D, a game that has all sorts of framerate and collision detection problems. Sadly, it's not much of an improvement over the original Road Rash port, which was pretty much a straight translation of the 3DO version of the game.

There are some changes worth mentioning, though, that make it a bit different from the original. This one has five tracks instead of nine, and a multiplayer mode is a nice addition. Some of the multiplayer options suck. In one, there's a sidecar where one player drives and another wields rides along and wields a weapon. Boring. In another, the player assumes the role of a copy and tries to arrest cyclists. Again, it's boring. The "Skull to Skull" mode, though, is pretty good -- that one allows two players to race by use of a "split screen" mode. My Wife and I often play that and try to beat the hell out of each others while avoiding other violent cyclists. Nifty!

The best part of the game, though, is the one that's worked for the Road Rash series for years -- going up in rank and getting better motorcycles by winning races. In Jailbreak, the player can be in one of two gangs, and by virtue of that choice can either drive sport bikes or cruisers. Sadly, the choices are limited in that the player can choose to ride one of two cycles at each rank.

Going up in rank involves placing at least third on nine different courses. Once the rank goes up, the player has access to more powerful cycles and has to race on longer courses. Here's where things start to get annoying -- controlling those bikes at higher levels on long courses is troublesome, and it becomes more work than fun after a time. If you can endure and survive until the end, you get the chance to break your gang leader of out jail.

So, that's about it for the way the game works. If you buy this, just leave the concept of realism at the door. If you were motoring around at 110 miles per hour and hit a car, a building, a tree or etc., you'd probably die. If you got smacked in the head with a crowbar at that speed and knocked off your motorcycle, you'd probably die, too. In Jailbreak, though, such situations don't cause you to die. They tend to cause you to have to get off the ground, dust yourself off, pick up your motorcycle and keep on racing. Odd.

The music on the disc is the typical loud, "in your face," alternative type of stuff. It's entertaining,but the bands featured here sound like they were influenced by the bands that provided the soundtrack for the first Road Rash port for the Playstation. That's odd to me.

The control is pretty good, particularly with the Dual Shock stick. Sadly, keeping your motorcycle on the road at higher levels is damn hard in spite of the responsive controls.

Oh, and there are short "films" throughout the game. They're all pretty stupid, much like the ones on the first port. They provide a nice break, though.

Once very nice feature is the ability to interact with everything on the road. Buildings, trees, cars and pedestrians are all over the place. If you don't crash when you hit some of those things, you can run the rest down. Hitting a jogger or a fellow in a suit is still fun after all these years. I'm glad that one can still slaughter pedestrians in this game. That provides some sick-minded entertainment, if nothing else.

The basic fighting rules are the same in this most-recent installment of Road Rash. You can still kick other cyclists (it's particularly fun to kick them in the paths of oncoming cars). You can still get weapons and smack them with them.

What I absolutely hate about this game has to do with all the damn bugs. There are times when the Playstation seems confused and displays a screen full of trees or what have you. This means you can't see where you're going and makes it necessary to reset the game. That's a drag.

All in all, this is a good installment in the Road Rash series, but doesn't improve enough upon the original to warrant purchasing it if you have the first port. That, folks, is the bottom line on this one.