games: Skate 2

Skateboarding is the heroic pursuit of motor skills no human could ever need. No control pad is ever going to be like skateboarding, unless you smash it against your elbows until the shockwaves shatter your ribs.

Skate at least made it feel a bit more intuitive, by taking away Tony Hawk’s button-tapping and D-pad controls and letting you use the right thumbstick to flick the board into the basic Ollies, heel flips, Pop Shuv-Its, and… Gravy Dogfights. Not to mention using the shoulder buttons to tweak those basic moves into aerial tricks and grabs.

Skate 2 is pretty much the same deal, but with a completely renovated San Vanelona to play around it. You can now get off your board - although walking around is horrible, because they’ve used the rotate/go forwards controls from the first Resident Evil game. You can set markers and teleport to them, which is great for failing a trick and retrying it dozens of times.

The tricks are hard, especially the advanced ones but even the basics aren’t easy. For example, it’s really fussy about whether you connect with a rail for grinding, and because the right thumbstick controls the board, you’ve got to trust the game to give you a helpful camera angle. Which it often fails to do.

Sometimes it can be so frustrating you may just want to bite a towel as hard as you can, and pretend it’s a skateboarder’s face. But, if you’re inclined to fight through the long hours of weeping, screaming and punching yourself everywhere you can reach, the eventual satisfaction of chaining a few tricks is enough to make you start kissing that very same towel.

Of course, if you’ve played the first game, you’ll be able to transplant your muscle memories directly into this one. It’s not a huge evolution - hand plants and walking don’t make a new game - but with a video editor, a sound multiplayer, and a new town to play in, Skate 2 does iron out a few of niggly wrinkles that made Skate fall short of perfection.

Perhaps they’ve got to think about more new things to do for the next game - because that Tony Hawk points-decline is all about people resenting forking out money for the same game over and over again.

Skate 2 gets one thumb up!

IGN:
When EA Black Box dropped Skate onto store shelves in September 2007, it not only put up the first real competition for the long-time king Tony Hawk franchise, but wiped the floor with it. Selling twice as many copies as Activision’s near decade-old series, it was a big hit with gamers due in large part to its Fight Night-inspired Flickit control system where the right analog stick was used to perform most of your moves. 


TeamBox:
When EA first released Skate, there was skepticism that it could challenge the reign that Activision’s Tony Hawk series had over the genre. After it was released, though, that concern turned to praise, not only that there’d be more skateboarding titles on market for enthusiasts to enjoy, but that it did such a good job challenging the status quo with some different attitudes and approaches to gameplay.

1 UP:
Having the skating-game genre all to itself this time around, Skate 2 presents an interesting proposition as a sequel to an experience defined by its novelty. No longer tied to serving as a brutally successful experiment in virtual phys ed (that I absolutely loved), Skate 2 rolls with its realism and builds itself out as a bigger, more thorough skateboarding sim than its antecedent — and seemingly, a more casual one. Skate is now about skating, not learning how to do so. It’s not necessarily a better game as a result, but it’s unquestionably one worth playing.