Today, all I had time for was the Skate 2 demo.
I remember liking the Skate 1 demo (and have been waiting for it to drop in price ever since), and I have an intimate childhood bond with installments 1 through 3 of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, so Skate 2 is in the bag, right?
Well, maybe. I started up the demo, and was greeted with a character customization screen - my guy was lying on a dirty mattress, apparently ready to have his face rejiggered, Jack Nicholson’s-Joker-style. I hit A to flip my character to Female, and a dialog box slams onto the middle of the screen:
WARNING: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR GENDER?
Ominous. Turns out I really didn’t: all of the girls have volleyball-captain shoulders and look like homeless people. And so much for tweaking my homeless volleyball captain to look less homely — ‘character customization’ sliders appear to not do more than stretch one nose/ear/mouth model; not much room for subtlety here.
But it’s a skating game, not Tiger Woods ‘09, right? Who cares if my character looks like Martina Hingis after a night in a dumpster? Let’s thrash a sick sesh, dawg!
Speaking of which: for your amusement, I kept a list of phrases spoken by the various scuzzy types in the demo:
- “Killin’ lines, killer”
- “Convicted felon sesh”
After those two I forgot to keep listing, but you get the gist. Yep, turns out I’m fresh out of the slammer, which explains why I look like I’m fresh out of the slammer.
While all I have to compare to is the first Skate, my impressions of Skate 2 all fit into one of two categories: “Hey, this reminds me of Skate, sweet” and “Man, I hope this is tweaked in the full game”. The new features seem to have some kinks, or in some cases, just seem like they didn’t finish implementation.
For instance, initially it seems that dragging a dumpster will work well enough; just push Y to get off your board (years of Tony Hawk muscle memory meant I was constantly hopping off my board at inopportune times) and push LB to grab the side of a dumpster/table/rail. The camera then backs way up as your character leans back … and slides a dumpster around like The Hulk relocating a zamboni. My homeless person’s feet didn’t animate with the ground, you rotate the dumpster like it’s made out of origami paper, the gritty since of gravity that Skate does so well was shattered, and I was back in the world of modern Tony Hawk, having flashbacks to riding a blocky shopping cart down a hill in Alcatraz.
Once, as I was running around on foot, I pushed Y to zip the board back to my hand (choice to animate the board returning to the hand Jedi-style: bizarre) and it clonked me in the head, sending me flying. I’m not sure what to make of that. I also ended up with screwed-up sideways animations a few times — little glitches that would have seemed normal in the first Skate, but seem strange here, given that the skating mechanic itself seems virtually unchanged.
Overall, Skate 2 has reminded me how much I liked the mechanics from Skate, but it feels like Black Box is pushing the series outward rather than upward by adding on questionable mechanics. It may not hurt the series in the long run — I certainly hope not — but any step toward reducing their differentation to Tony Hawk is dangerous.
I’m sure Skate 2 will finally drive Skate 1’s price down, at which point I will definitely be purchasing.