Some extreme sports get more attention than others, and ATV racing seems to be lagging behind skateboarding and snowboarding in that department. But there have been some games in recent years that proved making a video game out of ATV racing is definitely worth doing; that it can be just as much fun and just as satisfying to race quads as it can be with cars and motorcycles. ATV Quad Power Racing 2 is Acclaim's latest entry into this lesser-known of the extreme sports.

Jumping right in to a race makes one thing very obvious: This game simply doesn't look as good as several other racing games. The riders and their bikes have a reasonable amount of detail and fairly accurate proportion, but their interaction with the environment is superficial at best. You'll kick up a fair amount of dirt with a quick start, but that's where the visual ballet ends. The lighting is static and the bike itself looks like it might be somewhere on the same plane of existence as the track, but sometimes it's hard to tell for sure. The environments themselves aren't bad, but they lack any interesting detail. Barrels with red smoke coming out of them are used to mark certain checkpoints, but the smoke itself is so poorly done it took me a lap or two to realize what it was supposed to be. To be fair, the graphics aren't terrible, they're just nothing to look twice at, particularly compared to other racing games of the past year.

The racing itself can be fun, despite the average eye candy. You get boost for pulling off tricks (you start off with a few and can unlock more as you go along) and the sense of speed is pretty good. There was no noticeable slowdown as scenery and slowpokes flew by. But the most satisfying thing about QPR2 is, hands down, kicking another rider clean off his quad. Obviously this won't appeal to hardcore racing fans, but it makes the game a lot of fun with a group of people around the TV.

There are a few functions added to the race to make it more interesting. Correct use of the "preload" button before going over a hill will give you a lot more air, which in turn makes it a lot more rewarding to pull off tricks. Those tricks give you more boost, and while it's not a boost of Knight Rider-proportions, it does serve to speed things up. The competitive A.I. is almost nonexistent. With a little practice even the greenest of racing gamers will have little trouble winning, up until the last few races.

One aspect of the game that without a doubt needs more attention is the crashes. Say what you want about strategy, speed and competition, every genre of racing owes at least some portion of its appeal to the anticipation and spectacular nature of the inevitable wreck. ATV racing is no exception, as other off road racing games illustrate. But ATV Quad Power Racing 2's wrecks are disappointing to say the least. The rider isn't flung through the air with the satisfyingly realistic physics of a rag doll, and the most air-bound launches are over far too quickly to make even the most sheltered gamer wince. They just don't look real, so they aren't all that satisfying.

QPR2 offers a fair amount of character models to choose from and a pretty good range of bikes to unlock. It doesn't offer the appearance freedoms of, say, Moto GP, which lets you change every spec of color from your boots to your handlebars, but there are several male and female characters and each has a unique look about them. The specs of the bikes are illustrated using expected scores like handling, acceleration, top speed, stability and "air".

There are also a lot of different modes of play. ATV academy takes you through the basics (and a little more). There's also single race, career, freestyle, challenge and multiplayer. The multiplayer is about as varied as it can get without going online. You can do a single race with bots, head to head with people only, championship (which is a season-long, one on one competition) and freestyle (just the stunts, ma'am). There are a total of 15 tracks to unlock, and they each have a certain theme like desert, jungle, ice and a construction site. They're fairly varied and interesting, but each suffers from a mediocre overall presentation.

Fortunately, customizable soundtracks, Dolby digital sound and support for HDTV (480p) and system link take almost full advantage of the Xbox's extras. But the hardcore ATV racing fans looking for an uber-realistic sim of their sport (don't laugh, maybe they're out there) won't be satisfied. It boils down to this: The novelty of kicking your friends from their bike in the heat of a race won't last forever, so once that aspect of the fun wears off so does any urge to hunker down to a night of ATV Quad Power Racing 2.