[pic from here.]

Skate the skateboarding game from EA is dead good. Better than Tony Hawk even. Well maybe not but certainly different from Tony Hawk. Less abstracted from actual skateboarding (not that I’m an expert or anything) There’s no crazy 3 minute combos and physics are fetishistically observed, half the joy of the game is rewinding and watching your collisions in slo-mo, seeing your avatar ragdoll off a rail and face-scrape along 10ft of tarmac can be genuinely wince inducing but is at the same time genuinely fun. There’s much more joy in motion and the learning curve is very smooth and gradual, very analogue, no moments of revelation like in Hawk where you figure out manuals and your score suddenly bumps another order of magnitude. A manual in Skate’s not a simple button press it’s a balancing act that takes days to get right consistently and then, I suspect, weeks to master. That’s the joy of analogue controls and simulated physics, there’s many more degrees of rightness.

My complaints: The incessant product placement (inevitable for EA I guess) and the graphical tone of the game, way too grungy, I’d like more retro 80s visuals as these are clearly totally now design wise (c.f. accompanying images) but then I guess the mass market might not quite be there yet esp. the US male teenager xbox mass market. The sound track’s alright too but it’s dominated by ‘exclusive’ tracks and it’s annoying it doesn’t just use audio off your hard drive (I knwo you can play your own stuff anyway but it should be mandatory to integrate it with the game so it pauses etc.). I guess a lot of EAs business model is about people paying to include their tracks and advertising.

[this one’s from here]

Summary

• Physics! +70%
• The colour brown -7%
• Frustration of trying to ollie up on to a a pavement and repeatedly failing -15%
• Finding out a couple of hours later that you can always make those ollies and it feels awesome +25%
• N.W.A - Express Yourself +20%
• T Mobile -10%
• Slayer - Raining Blood +10%
• First 30 seconds of intro movie +20%
• The Next half hour of the intro movie -25%
• Dopey real life skate boarders -20%
• Crashing into their stupid heads +20%

total 88% - Two Fat Ladies (you and yo mama)