Saturday, July 18, 2009

Skate 2 Review

Hello folks and desperate review seekers (for indeed, you must be VERY desperate to end up here, in the most isolated corner of the internet).

Well, i must say, after being disenchented with gaming for the past few years, i've decided, after a jealousy-induced shopping spree, to become the proud owner of a PS3.

And boy, have i been missing out!

The whole ordeal started when i stumbled upon what i first mistook for skateboard videos.
I soon realised - to my surprise - that these were in fact short clips made using the Skate 2 videogame, made with the downloadable filmer-pack.

ARG!

I HAD TO GET IT!

You see, i've skateboarder from 1995 to 2005. I was never really good, but it's the only physical activity that i would do during 3 seasons a year, enjoying snowboard during our Québec winters.
And with this sport of course came the many Tony Hawk Pro Skater games.

I would sit with a fellow skateboarder friend, in his parent's basement with the lights off, all night long riding together in free skate mode. We'd find a spot, tear it up as realisticly as we could, and then move on. We would comment our landing, our smooth 180s, if a double-kickflip down 20 stairs 'looked' fake.

If you too were one of these persons, then my friend, you NEED Skate 2.


I purchased the game the night before a day off from slavery where my girlfriend woul also have to work, just to make sure i could fully appreciate the game. I plugged the time-consuming demon in the wall and TV, eroticly inserted the game in the console, opened a cold beer, turned off the lights, and skated away.

In 2 days, i cumulated 15 hours of gameplay, to my pets' frustrations.

First impression: smooth, pretty, realistic, entertaining.

A deeper look however reveals some frustrating habits.
First, there's the new ''meathall'' feature. Your biggest bails get you money. You can can get scores on especially violent bails. You can even see wich bones you fractured. This is entertaining at first.

Then, you start skating. The game is realistic, so you can't pop everything all the time efortlessly like THPS. This is okay. But bailing from failing to ollie on a sidewalk and having to watch you fall like a mongo-newb in slowmotion is incredibly frustrating after 4 hours of gameplay.

The controls are pretty cool. The left analog stick controls the movements and direction of your skater, and the right analog stick controls your feet. Think NHL 09, with the right control stick instead controling your hockey stick.

By the way, the in-game tutorial helps a lot. I couldn't figure out how to do tailslides and bluntslides, my 2 favourite, until i checked the video and looked at the precise gesture you have to make.

For exemple, an ollie will have you bring the stick down, and then up quickly. To make a kickflip, if you ride regular, would have the same movement but instead of directly up, you move the stick slightly to the left. Opposite when you ride switch, and from up to down when you ride Nollie or Fakie. It's so precise in fact that it can prove frustrating when you are making a video and need a specific flip trick in your sequence and keep getting the wrong one.

But, something makes it easier. Waypoints. I think that's what it's called hehe. Basically you can stop riding at any place in the world, place a little invisible waypoint with L1 and down arrow, and skate on. If you need to return to that specific point, you press L1 and up arrow, and are returned there instantly. You can only place one though.

I was making a little sequence, doing a shuv-it down a flight of stairs, then poping a smooth bs 180 kickflip on a curved bridge, and finishing with a bs boardslide down a rail. For some reason, i kept doing varial kickflip instead of the real kickflip. I would not even land that i would be returning to the waypoint to try again.

All and all, a very addictive game for skateboarders. I do not recommend it for people that don't give 2 damns about the extreme sport however, as the game can be very frustrating and not very spectacular when you compare it to THPS. No 60-foot drops doing a Madonna just to land on an overcrook, jumping from a ledge with a Laser flip onto a rail doing a feeble.

But for the retired skateboarding, this is heaven.