Grinding, ollies, burns, half pipes; the terminology of the skater. Many moons ago in my youth when I first found myself into the skate punk/ska scene I purchased a skateboard – it turned out my sense of balance was akin to that of a habitual drunk with sea sickness. In short, I sucked at it. So it was with the advent of the Tony Hawks Pro Skate series of games that I was able to live out my skate career in video game format as opposed to the local infirmary where I was no doubt destined to end up had I persisted with the real kind of boarding.
Now the problem with the Tony Hawk games was that as each new game was released, the gameplay became weaker, more desperate and less believable – physics and gravity defying jumps were the order of the day here and I slowly grew bored of the whole series. It was then that I caught wind of an EA game called Skate which promised to bring realism back to video game skateboarding. I wasn't entirely convinced as I still harboured the belief that all skate games would be far too similar to the TH series. Instead I stuck to shooting things online.
However, the good things that had been written about Skate still persisted and I started to think that perhaps maybe, just maybe, EA had pulled off their promise. When I decided to finally check it out, a sequel, Skate 2, had been released. Not wishing to blow my forty shekels on a game that I hadn't checked out fully, I downloaded the Skate 2 demo from Xbox Live. So, stick on your pads, dig out those baggiest of jeans because this is what I found.
Once downloaded, the demo sees you getting used to controlling your deck (see, I'm speaking the lingo already now) by getting you to skate and run to see a dude by the name of Slappy. You start by customising how your skater will look, hair, face, clothes, accessories, skateboard etc then its off to meet Slappy. The story starts as you have just been released from prison, it appears that skateboarding really is a crime in these parts. You start with the basics; how to propel yourself along, this is simply by holding A or X with Y seeing you jump off the board and having you run or walk. Ollies, jumps to the uninitiated, are achieved by moving the right thumb stick backward and forward in different directions and angles to achieve varying types of jump or trick. I don't intend to run through every possible combination of trick as this would be futile but suffice to say, the controls themselves are slick and easy to pull off, timing on the other hand, is a different story and I found myself hitting the tarmac with a bone crunching regularity. Ouch. The animations are excellent and, to my relief, realistic; just what you'd expect to see on your average skate park, tricks, jumps, grinds but well with within the laws of physics and totally believable. There was a time limit to achieve certain goals when you finally reach the park, jump this, grind that, you get the idea, but I couldn't help but feel I'd have achieved a bit more had I just been able to free skate a little more with a greater sense of freedom, I'm not sure whether this time factor was strictly a demo thing or if it is actually included in the game.
So it was a very brief demo, with the whirring of wheels and snapping of wrists fairly short lived but one that definitely piqued my interest and I can see myself renting Skate 2 for a full on look at what promises to be a very entertaining, and thankfully, realistic game.