Jackass: The Game for PlayStation 2 Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Ah, Jackass. How we knew thee. After only a couple seasons on the air and two grotesquely funny films, we wish there were more to see. While we'll have to hold our breath for a third live action film (which may or may not ever happen), at least we can cause some digital damage with Jackass: The Game for the PlayStation 2 and PSP. The overarching story of the game has you directing the new season of Jackass, which in this case only runs for seven episodes. Each episode has five stunts to perform, making for a grand total of 35 stunts. In essence, Jackass: The Game is a collection of mini-games, all of them simplistic by nature, though some much more so than others. Each is very easy to play, requiring very few buttons. Only a couple took more than one try to figure out what to do, like the timing on an explosive golf stunt. But generally speaking, they're very simple by nature. Therein lays Jackass' biggest strength and weakness. On the one hand, since the stunts are so easy to play and you can generally pass through them quickly, it means that you'll constantly be doing something new. But at the same time, many of the stunts are rather forgettable and don't really have much replay value. While most of them are fun the first time you try them out, they lose their appeal if you try and go back to them a second or third time. Stunts range from very simplistic things like a game of shopping cart chicken on top of a skyscraper where you simply tap X to race forward, and then time a pressing of Square to stop before falling over the edge. On the more complex end (relatively speaking), you'll find golf kart events where you have to take out flags and such as your goals, or a Katamari Damacy-esque snowball stunt where you roll down a ski hill and attempt to gobble up as many skiers, snowmobiles and other objects as possible. Generally speaking, the actual content of the stunts is better than actually playing them, which is why they quickly tire. Once you've seen someone dive into a giant vat of poop a couple times, the stunt isn't all that fun anymore. Still though, you'll find that the handful of hours that you spend running through the game to be entertaining for the fact that you'll want to see what's next, if nothing else. That brings us to another disappointment in that the game is over rather quickly. While there are a ton of unlockables in the title, if you're not intent on collecting everything then the experience won't last you for very long at all. Fortunately, the collectables are rather good, ranging from new characters to show clips to behind-the-scenes footage and more. The entire main crew of Jackass, sans Bam Margera, was present for the production and lent their voices and likeness to the title, and some of the footage that you can unlock of them recording their lines and so forth is entertaining. Oddly enough, the PSP version has a number of features that were left out of the PS2 game. For one thing, you're able to watch and edit replays of some stunts on both games (including changing playback speed, camera angles and more), but you can only save them on the PSP. You also have access to a show editor where you can load multiple replay and put together an episode, and you can upload these shows or individual replays online for others to see (or download other folks' creations). As well, the PSP version offers support for Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure-based multiplayer and downloadable content. In other words, the PSP game has far more features than the PS2 version, making the console variant feel incomplete because of this.

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