Pimp My Ride (Xbox 360)
From 2004 to 2007, MTV’s Pimp My Ride provided an interesting car customization show where a clunker would not only be souped up to be more stylish but would take on some absurdly lavish enhancements. The Xbox 360 game that aimed to adapt that idea sounds like it gets the appeal on paper, the player not only able to participate in the modification of the vehicle but also able to drive that enhanced car around town afterwards if they so choose. After playing the first level with its low difficulty and straightforward route to customization and money earning, Pimp My Ride seems like it is a game idea with some potential, but as you pimp the next ride and the ride after that, slowly the realization sets in that what felt like an opener to ease you in will actually be the entirety of the experience, the advancements in gameplay afterward too minimal to stave off the incredible repetition.
Pimp My Ride has 15 main missions for its story mode as well as a special level near the end, but for the majority of them the gameplay will unfold in an incredibly predictable manner. When you select the person whose car you’ll be improving, you first need to set out in the appropriately named Pimp City to earn the cash you’ll be using to customize their ride. During this segment you’ll find the driving controls are pretty decent and actually weighted in your favor, meaning that you can smash into groups of cars with little impediment to your maneuverability. Hitting solid barriers might send you spinning out, but damage to your vehicle is not tracked so you can be as rough as you like with your vehicle. This does lead to a rather amusing way to drive by smashing into most every car you can see on the road, the game not only letting you build up massive pileups that you shove forward like a bulldozer even if you’re driving a small car but the cars spit out a burst of cash when hit. The money gained from this method is too minimal to really work towards the main collection phase but it can add a little extra to the amount you need to work with when its customization time. Driving around is also when you will likely see the most glitches in this game, things like pedestrians walking high up in the air or even your car potentially falling through the road if you dare to get too much air in a game that doesn’t want you to jump, but these aren’t so common that they’re even guaranteed to be seen during play.
During this phase your main means of earning money will be little objectives shown on your GPS. You can try to destroy all the signs and parking meters in the current segment of the city cordoned off for that particular mission, but there are no clues on their location and finding them all would be a lengthy task. Instead, you’ll likely rely on three minigame types. The least offensive is cruising, where groups of people will be lined up on the side of the road and if you approach them while driving slowly you’ll be asked to Holla back at them. This takes the form of a series of button inputs appearing on the screen that you need to press before you run out of time, but even in the last mission where the list of inputs is fairly long the time pressure isn’t that great so you can usually perform this money making task easily and move on fairly quickly.
Missions usually have a few cruise spots, but your real cash influx will come from Hot Steppin’ and Ghost Riding the Whip. While named separately and playing differently, these two minigame both involve your driver character setting their vehicle to slowly drift forward while they are out of the vehicle performing dance moves alongside it. Even if you fail miserably your character will dance flawlessly, and despite the background music, the button inputs tied to this minigame are not rhythm based. Instead, Hot Steppin’ involves a horizontal bar at the bottom of the screen where the A button prompt will appear and drift towards the center. When it has reached the center indicator you press A, the indicator shrinking as the minigame goes on but the buttons are never so clustered that this ever gets difficult. Performing this perfectly is easy enough so the goals where the game will reward you more cash for streaks or perfect play are easy to snag in Hot Steppin’, but Ghost Riding the Whip is a little different. Intermittently during your character’s unrelated dancing, a vertical bar representing a timer appears alongside a sequence of buttons you need to press in order. Here pressing them quickly is key, and when the game adds longer input lists as well as control stick inputs and even control stick rotations, you do start to hit the point where playing perfectly isn’t as guaranteed. However, playing both of these minigames as they barely progress in difficulty 15 times at least and possibly more if you didn’t complete enough goals definitely wears on you, and the money acquisition phase ends up becoming one of the worst parts of the experience.
Once you do have the cash you need to pimp someone’s ride, you do get to one of the better parts of the experience. The show’s host Xzibit hosts the game’s version of events as well and he actually has quite a varied and creative set of insults and quips for the run-down rides you’ll be working together to enhance. He manages to bounce between dry wit, fun puns, and amusing observations pretty fluidly, but the people he speaks with do come up short. Their reactions are probably fairly accurate, mostly a lot of surprise and amazement at the situation they’re in, but this doesn’t show on their faces as their mouths can move but they show no emotion. They can have a fun dialogue with Xzibit at times as they explain how their vehicle ended up in such a sorry state, some of the clunkers absurdly damaged or barely holding together for some nice contrast to how they’ll look when you’re done with them.
After that actually decent intro to the car you’ll be working on, you’re immediately put into it but already in a significantly improved condition. No more dings or paint damage as you must now drive the car around town in search of the shops that can upgrade it into an even better state. This segment features a timer to add some pressure to the task and you are technically competing with a rival to see who adds the better customization options, but the rival is so incompetent that even in the final level they’re often still barely getting any work done and only really put up a threat if you’re in one of the subsections of Pimp City where limited routes make getting to every shop in the time limit difficult. Sometimes during this segment Xzibit might provide a special upgrade if you can find him, if you found hidden dealers during the regular driving they’ll appear here with high end goods, and sometimes enemy drivers appear to try and damage your work but they’re hard to even pick out from the regular traffic and are mostly just appreciated since they briefly freeze the timer while they incompetently drive nearby.
When you do pull up to one of the shops, you’ll find associated customization options like sound systems, paint jobs, and body kits. Body kits are unfortunately rather boring throughout as the game never gets too creative with the modifications to the car’s build, but the paint comes in many flavors from simple to shiny to more ornate design patterns. Sound systems can go from simple stereos to CD changers, fancy speakers, and built in MP3 players, and you can get plenty of fancy spinners for the wheels. Interiors can be enhanced not only with various materials for the seating but different patterns and textures, and most interesting of all are the absurd custom tech you can have built into the car. Some of these seem rooted a bit in reality like fold-down TV screens for the back seats, but one of the highlights of customization is seeing the many weird devices you can add to the car. You can have a trunk with a garden in it, a fold-out mechanical bull, punching bags built in and basketball hoops. So many wonderfully advanced and unusual ideas appear during this customization step with little regard for if someone in real life really would want a telescope in the back seat and just seeing what the current mission’s batch of weird ideas is ends up a treat.
In fact, the car customization threatens to be really good and a lot of love was definitely put into the variety and visuals of this aspect of the game. It’s just a shame that there’s so little point to it all. Meters measure how good the game thinks your modifications are and the truth is, no matter the client or upgrade synergy, the best customization options will always be clearly indicated with more stars than the others and cost the most cash. You will easily win the day and please the client since all you have to do is scroll past all those creative options and pick the last one, there being no reward for doing any less than that and the minimum amount of cash needed to even start the upgrade phase usually covers all the work you can do on the car. Partly that will be because each modification can be made a touch cheaper by playing a quick and easy no pressure minigame, many of which are just about mashing a single button, moving the stick back and forth, or hitting a button sequence that’s easier than a single round of Ghost Riding the Whip. If Pimp My Ride limited your cash better or had a multiplayer mode where people could actually compete on the same level then maybe you wouldn’t just be picking the final upgrade for easy wins every time, but this is a solo experience with incompetent opposition and thus the process of pimping a ride is hollow. The game almost had a good idea for how to make it more involved too, each person whose ride you’re altering having a small list of interests that do influence the kinds of paint jobs and extra technology offered but you don’t even need to remember what they like since the choices that do align with their tastes are either already the highest rated options or won’t impress them more than even a plain pick that costs more.
To make it even more hollow though there’s the presentation of your vehicle to the client. Your computer opponent’s car is also present for comparison, but its humble appearance is not only underwhelming competition but Xzibit won’t even dignify it with much direct acknowledgement. After introducing your upgrades, Xzibit actually having quite a lot of dedicated lines to mention even the less exciting upgrade options to make it at least feel like a proper presentation, he’ll then say something like “But what about the other ride?” as the camera pans over and things go quiet as he refuses to comment save for rare situations like when you and the AI bought the same modification. After your car is easily picked over the other you actually get the option to drive the souped up vehicle in the next mission, and while you won’t be having the dedicated surfboard waxer popping out during play, at least you get to see your bodywork in action as you prepare to do the same tedious minigames for the next client.
THE VERDICT: Pimp My Ride on Xbox 360 hits some of the most important parts of MTV’s hit show, Xzibit’s commentary amusing and well-written and the customization options providing the expected spectacle both in their sleek looks or absurd modifications. However, besides plowing through traffic, all of the action in Pimp My Ride is rehashed with little alteration as you compete against an opponent who barely feels present. All of the modification work is boiled down to picking the highest rated options and the minigames played to earn cash or get discounts only get mildly more difficult over the course of the game and are mostly still too simplistic and bland to entertain. The urge to customize a car is dampened when you’re encouraged to just pick the most expensive options to win, the absence of multiplayer just adding to the problems with this glitchy game with little depth.
And so, I give Pimp My Ride for Xbox 360…
A TERRIBLE rating. As alluded to in the opening paragraph, Pimp My Ride could have been much better if built off the groundwork it lays out in the first mission. Adding true difficulty to the customization competition like an opponent who can actually buy decent upgrades or having the player actually need to make informed choices on what to add would enhance the action side of things to match the attention given to the visuals of the modification process. Xzibit’s jokes and the wide variety of upgrades both unusual and stylish capture what you would want from a game focused on souping up old run-down rides, but the player’s experience is mired in gameplay decisions that make those brief moments of life an oasis in a game starved for interesting content. Pimp City may be split into five sections that do have unique layouts and visual identities but you’ll still be doing the same two main minigames for cash that never get more engaging, you’ll still be easily grabbing all the upgrades you need to please the client since the game requires you to grab enough cash to not need to almost never worry about the pricing, and perhaps the only real informed decision you’ll make is which route to take to the businesses you need to visit even though you don’t need to be too picky to beat the AI. The unusual presentation of the opponent’s car and their mere presence in the first place does make me think this was meant to be a multiplayer game but perhaps that never came together, so instead we’re left with a car customization game that had plenty of potential in regards to its handling of the aesthetics but almost nothing to offer when it comes to the actual task of pimping a ride.
While only two minigames of real money-making potential based around the same idea of dancing beside your unmanned vehicle is definitely a bad idea, much of Pimp My Ride did have a chance of working. Much of the love required in key areas like the host’s commentary and the visual appeal of the vehicle upgrades is there, but Pimp My Ride’s engine never gets going and it’s stuck in first gear for the whole ride. A refusal to meaningfully iterate, crank up the difficulty, or really add any sort of involved consideration keep this from being a good mix of driving play and customization work. Pimp My Ride on Xbox 360 may have some of the polish and sheen of the kinds of cars you show to the client, but when it comes to the gameplay, it’s the same sort of barely held together clunker that Xzibit would find easy to mock.