Being the new kid on the block is hard. You might have experienced that first day at a new school, in a new town full of people who’ve known each other for as many years as you’ve been alive. You show up for class, reluctantly wearing an outfit your mother bought for you, carrying an unfortunate colored backpack that has neon tassles tied to the zippers. All eyes are on you.
You sit down next the prettiest girl in the class, not because you wanted to (hell, you were too afraid to even look in her direction), but because it’s the only seat available. Nervously, you go to take out your new Trapper Keeper from your unfortunate back pack and … oops! You spill the contents all over the ground, your entire Magic: The Gathering deck exposed to a room full of people who instantly become far cooler than you could ever hope to be.
For skate, a new skateboarding videogame franchise for next-gen consoles, life’s a bit easier. Its dad, Electronic Arts, is rich, so it has the fanciest, trendiest clothes in school. Its also naturally good looking, because its graphic engine is taking advantage of close to two years of next-gen experience. Its easy to be jealous, easy to be skeptical or even hate skate.
But you’d be doing yourself a disservice. Because despite having a rich dad, fancy clothes, and a far better physique that you could ever have without a personal trainer, skate seems like a pretty nice guy.
After what seems like 43 iterations of Activision’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise, one might say it’s time for a change. Still, Tony Hawk’s name and brand is strong, and despite what what might argue is a series in danger of becoming stagnant, the games are relatively solid.
Enter Electronic Arts, switching up the playing field with a different take on skateboarding titles — realistic physics, real-world skating techniques, impressive open-world environments, and visuals that two passes at next-gen Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has yet to touch.
This game feels about as far away from THPS as you can possibly get. Unlike Tony Hawk’s “hold down the ollie button to crouch and gain speed mechanic,” skate gives you total control of your skaters individual feet, allowing you to use them to propel yourself forward — pressing the A or B causes your skater to push himself along. The more you kick, the faster you go. Once you’ve gained speed, your skater will coast along at a nice even pace, freeing up your fingers to let you do what the game is all about — tricks.
Taking a page from the EA book of “These Controllers Have Analog Sticks, Let’s Use Them for Everything: The Kudo Tsunoda Story,” most of your movement is done with the analog sticks. Where as the left stick will move you about, the right stick is used to mainly control your skaters weight on the board.
Pulling back on the stick and flicking upwards allowed me to do an ollie; pulling back longer and flicking up harder changed the power and height of said trick. By using the controller in different ways (flicking up and to the right, or swinging the stick around to the right or left), various flip tricks were possible. I found it easy enough to skate around and perform a variety of flip tricks with this control style, which EA is calling “Flickit.”
I could also use the analog stick to manual by pulling back slightly on the right analog stick. Once I found that “sweet spot,” manually along wasn’t an issue. There’s no balance meters visible; since I was balancing the stick, I was also balancing the skater. Additionally, the controllers left and right triggers controlled my skaters hands, which could be used in connection with the right analog stick to perform grab tricks.
All of this falls right in line with EA’s mission to give gamers total control of their on screen movements, allowing them to feel like they’re actually skating, as opposed to pressing wild button combinations and watching the on screen action. Active participation and realism is the key here — if you’re looking to perform insane, non-stop strings of combos, you’re playing the wrong game.
Having played the THPS series for so many years, my first few minutes with skate were a bit awkward. Because it’s so drastically different (with its real physics, new control scheme), it’s tough to break from the THPS mentality. Grinding, for example, no longer is mapped to a button, and there’s no longer that “magnet” that will pull you onto ledges, leaving your only job to be balancing you skater. Grinds have to be timed properly so that when your skater lands, the board is exactly where it needs to be. Different for sure, but not impossible — after a few tries and finally understanding the timing of my analog stick flicks, I was landing a few tricks like a pro.
Because the game has real world physics, the skater has a weight and feel that’s unlike what I was familiar with. Wild tricks and crazy air are off of the table in skate, and my desire to fly all over the game’s open world was squashed. But that doesn’t mean real-world are any less cool — sometimes reality is crazy enough. Anyone familiar with skateboarding videos can attest to this.
With that in mind, EA has created an in-game video editor which can be used on the fly. At any moment in the game, you can pause and rewind the past 30 to 60 seconds of gameplay. This footage can be edited and saved for later use; players will be able to either send skate videos to be viewed by others with the skate disc. Alternately, footage can also be uploaded to a skate server and can be viewed as a Flash video in any web browser.
At one point in the demo, I ollied off a high-ledge and had hit something with my board. I tumbled to the ground hard (the game quickly brought up an image of a skeleton, showing me which bones I had broken, in addition to some other status), but had missed who or what I had hit. The in-game video allowed me to pause and rewind the action — I soon found out that I had nailed a pedestrian (a woman) in the face with my skateboard (in the demo, she was one tough b**ch and didn’t even react, but I was told this would be changed in the final release).
As a pessimist and a long-time fan of its competitor, I didn’t expect to walk away with and overwhelmingly positive reaction to skate. But after spending 15 minutes with it, I’m really not sure I could go back to the over-the-top, button pressing action of THPS. The feel and the approach is fresh; this September, it looks like EA is going to add another solid sports title to their already long list of dominant franchises.
Someone stop these guys from making good games before they eat up the industry! My inner message board troll can’t take liking all of these “mainstream” titles.
