I initially fell in love with EA’s skate.. I’m sorry including the second period there, but the literal title of the game is skate.. So every time the title of the game ends a sentence in this review, there will be two periods, GRAMMAR CONVENTIONS BE DAMED!!!!

At any rate, I digress. I initially fell in love with EA’s skate.. It was charming, it was new, it was fresh, and above all, it was fun. The Tony Hawk franchise has dominated this genre for nigh on a decade now, and why not? The games, although mostly rehashes with slight changes, are a lot of fun. They don’t focus on realism, rather on arcade fun, so you’re not worrying about bumping into a rock and falling off your board, or how often you have to push to get some speed, or how perfectly straight you have to land not to fall. skate. tries a new approach. The entire view of the game, save for some specific instances (more on that later though) is shot from the perspective of a guy following your skater filming him. All the action is close up and down low. Further breaking from Tony Hawk tradition, skate. focuses more on realism than showiness. In Tony Hawk, it is expected that you throw together 3 flip tricks two grabs and 720 degrees of spin before you jump in on a rail and grind for 15 minutes. Not so in skate.. You are rewarded big for doing a large ollie, throwing a simple flip trick, grinding for 10 feet then jumping off and landing cleanly. While the more realistic approach to skating is nice, the biggest difference between the Tony Hawk games and skate. is the way tricks are executed. All board control is handled with the right thumbstick. skate. follows EA’s next-gen paradigm by eliminating button mashing. To ollie (skater lingo for jump), you push down on the right stick, then flick it straight up. To do a kickflip or heelflip, push down on the stick, then flick it 45 degrees right or left. Using the thumbsticks for tricks is challenging, but not so much so that it’s frustrating. It also allows for some much more complicated tricks later on, using any combination of thumbstick spins, flicks and twists. This, combined with the lower view, slower pace, and more realistic trick expectations leads to some really fun and fulfilling sequences. It’s extremely rewarding and fun to skate up to a 2 foot high ledge, launch into a flip trick, grind on the ledge, then flip trick out. It gives a feeling of accomplishment that was never present in the Tony Hawk button mashing sequences. Grinding, as well, is handled a little differently in skate.. To grind, you simply ollie up at an obstacle and situate your board so that it slides across the ledge or rail. It’s a pretty easy concept, and it helps with the overall smoothness of the game. skate.’s realistic approach works well; the realism isn’t tedious or frustrating - it finds a very harmonic balance between realism and fun.


skate. is also loaded with style. As with any game worth its salt that incorporates scoring points based on tricks, there is a points multiplier that goes up based on how technical and difficult your trick sequence is (read: how many points you score). As your points multiplier goes up, the color temperature and saturation of the game’s graphics change. Get a one-and-a-half point multiplier and the game gets more colorful. Get a double point multiplier and the game gets a little brighter. Get a triple point multiplier and the saturation increases drastically. The colors are brighter, and the the world takes on a very bright and yellow hue. It’s an interesting concept that works well with the game, providing both a visual cue to how well you’re doing and adding a nice element of style. Your player takes on the role of an amateur skater rising to the top of the skateboard world.


The game starts with you picking your skater’s name (I chose the staple, Asschaps) and customizing his appearance. As you gain notoriety (read: complete goals), you start gaining the attention of skate magazines and sponsors. Each time you reach a milestone you get a phone call on your T-Mobile Sidekick to travel to a spot to meet a photographer for a magazine shoot. You have to perform a certain sequence while he takes pictures. It’s actually kind of cool, he’ll snap a sequence of shots of you doing your trick, and you get to choose which shot you want to appear in the magazine. After you’ve taken photos, you can upload them via XBox Live to the skate.ea.com site and share them with the world. Another cool feature going hand-in-hand with the photo aspect is the replay editor. If you complete a killer sequence, you can go back and watch and edit your footage. It’s a really cool idea, but unfortunately, it needed a bit more tweaking to reach its full potential. First, there’s no real way to tell how far back the footage will be saved. You could spend twenty minutes practicing for a killer line down a hill, go out and nail it flawlessly, only to go back and see that half of your footage (or ‘footy’ as the game calls it - more on that soon) isn’t there. Another let down with the replay editor is the static camera angles. This is a full 3D game in a full 3D world, but when you’re editing your footy, you can only choose from five canned camera angles. It’s not even that big of a deal, it’s just disappointing to see a next-gen game on a next-gen system fail in something that Super Mario 64 mastered a decade ago; that is a full-on 3D camera.


This is the point where the honeymoon starts to end and my love with skate. starts to wan and I start to get fed up with EA (as usual). The game starts out being a blast! It’s new and fresh and fun! You get the sense that you’re not going to be asked to do any ridiculous maneuvers like ollie down from a twenty foot high building and grind around a basketball hoop, a-la Tony Hawk. In skate., while you’re not asked to do the impossible, towards the later stages of the game, I got the feeling that the earlier principles were abandoned in favor of flash. All of a sudden, I was asked to ride down 100 foot ramps and jump 200 feet in the air. While it was fun, it came out of left field and it felt like it was tacked on as an afterthought. Another extremely annoying aspect of the game is the commentary your camera man gives. Speaking in some kind of hybrid New Jersey-Long Island accent, he says things like, ‘Hey my man, I’ve been keepin’ this spot under wraps for a minute!’ when you roll by a good skating spot. He insists on calling his film ‘footy,’ which is not only annoying, it’s fucking obnoxious. I don’t care if skaters really call their footage footy. It’s obvious that some old (or maybe just extremely nerdy) assholes were trying to be hip and XTREME!!!!! (notice how extreme that is! no e at all, that is so XTREME!!!!) to give themselves some ’street cred,’ ‘dawg’ ‘.’


Apart from the absolutely obnoxious and grating dialogue, which is not only uttered by your cameraman, but also spoken by the pro skaters who make cameos in the game, the game has a pretty sad soundtrack. Perhaps I was spoiled by the eclectic (and good) soundtracks of the Tony Hawk games, but by the end of the game, I was sick of hearing Surrender by Cheap Trick and Green Onions by Booker T. Green Onions works well in The Sandlot (possibly because it was recorded during the time the movie takes place), but fails in a modern XTREME skating game. The game also feels unfinished, and buggy. I had several hangups while playing the story mode, and many sound glitches. Not all of it was bad though: I somehow found a way to mute the cameraman’s commentary once, which was a Godsend, but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to replicate that bug (although I do have a team of four monkeys working ’round the clock to figure out how I did it).


While playing online, I also found that if you pause the game for too long and then resume, your own voice is played through your XBox Live headset, as well as through the headsets of people you’re playing with. I don’t think it needs to be said, so I’ll say it: This is friggin’ annoying!!! I hate the way my voice sounds when it’s not reverberating around inside my head, almost as much as I hate hearing what I just said played through that annoying voice. While I played over Xbox Live for only a total of about three hours, it was pretty underwhelming. I played free skate with my younger brother, hoping to be able to cruise around the city and find some fun spots to hit. Wrong. You are only able to skate at certain selected spots with certain selected boundaries. These are the spots that you skate at throughout the whole game anyway, so you’re already familiar (read: bored) with them. I also played attack the spot locally with two other friends, which was fun, but wasn’t anything special. It consists of you each player taking a turn trying to score the highest trick sequence off of a specific spot. Good for about 30 minutes before one player starts dominating and it gets boring.


Included in skate. is EA’s usual business model of ‘advertise till the user’s eyeballs melt and they’re forced to buy these kickass Oakley sunglasses.’ For the most part, the advertising isn’t a bad thing.. It’s a game about skating, and what skating game would be complete without real shoes, board, trucks, and wheel sponsors. That is fine, because it fits in perfectly with what the game is pushing for: a realistic skating experience. My problem is this: it’s clear that a lot of money is being made by EA for advertising. That would be fine, had they delivered a flawless product. The problem is, the game is not polished, it wasn’t finished, it was buggy and didn’t work completely correctly. I can understand charging 60 bucks for a game to cover development, shipping, and advertising costs. What I can’t abide is charging 60 bucks for a game that is buggy but full of ads. I felt like I was being duped by EA, as if they were saying, ‘yeah we’re going to charge you 60 bucks and make money off of that, and after we’re done making money off of that, we’re going to become filthy-fucking rich off of all these ads we’re shoving down your throats, and you’re going to like it.’ It doesn’t detract from the gameplay any, it’s just a pretty big annoyance.


skate. failed to live up to its potential, which is quite disappointing, because it had oodles and oodles of potential. Unfortunately, the story mode got a bit ridiculous, and the bugs became quite old after a while. The multiplayer left a lot to be desired, although some players will surely find merit in it. This is a game I’ll probably break out now and again throughout the next year before I shelve it entirely.

My rating: 3.5 stars