The single player game offers the chance to either stick to your roots as a hog- or crotch rocket-riding biker (Jail Break mode), or take to the streets as the nightstick wielding long arm of the law (Five-O mode). The new bikes you earn as you rise through the ranks do feel different (this can range from tighter control to faster acceleration to higher top speed), especially after you've spent a fair amount of time on your old bike.

As you race, you'll earn better bikes and weapons, but the competition gets the same benefits. Now depending on the gang you pick at the start of the game, you will either control a bad ass hog, or a slick, speedy crotch rocket. The whole goal behind Jailbreak is to rise in rank through one of 2 gangs you pick until you can finally lead the charge to break the king of all bikers, Spaz out of jail, hence the title Road Rash: Jailbreak. Road Rash wouldn't work if not for the perfect balance of racing and combat, and I'm proud to say that Jailbreak delivers, with the small addition of combos to the combat side and upgradeable bikes to boot.

Neither element is all that good by itself, but it's when they're brought together, like that prodigious moment when peanut butter met chocolate, that they become something truly greater than the sum of their parts. Gameplay Road Rash is, at its heart, just a simple beat-em-up and a racer. Road Rash: Jailbreak is fun, but not in the same way it used to be. Everything that makes up Road Rash is here, but it's somehow lost its soul along the way.

It's all there, but with little in the way of innovation or originality. The control is there, the fighting is there, the speed is there, the crappy framerates are there, and the gritty graphics are there. It's as if the game was ripped directly from the cart I spent so many years neigh-umbilically attached to, and plopped onto a CD. Suffice it to say, Road Rash: Jailbreak is the same game I left in my childhood. A short minute later, the gleam was gone, and my hand was still shaking-in rage. I was lucky enough to really start getting into games around the time Road Rash came out, and so it was with gentile gleam in eye and shaky hand that I popped the Jailbreak CD in my PlayStation.

It's combination of balls-to-the-wall racing, coupled with pavement-eating fighting created a sub-genre that has never been successfully duplicated. The original Road Rash helped define the attitude of the Genesis during the 16-bit wars.

Road rash ps1