over at bit tech - dont think i can link due to competitor ads on the site
I AM VERY EXCITED
Bit Tech said:Expected Release Date: Q1 2009
- WALK
Naturally, the ability to get off the board is going to be hugely helpful for those moments when you’re trying to line up a perfect set of grinds and jumps, but it may also prove a bit controversial. I for one remember almost coming to blows with a friend when the ability to dismount the board was first introduced in Tony Hawk's. Sure, it may be helpful, but it’s also a great way to break the game by letting combos continue as you walk around. Thankfully, Skate doesn’t handle walking in the same way as THUG and nor does it make it a matter of hammering the left and right foot buttons just to take a step. Instead, walking is introduced more as a tool than a trick thanks to the ability to interact with the environment in a direct and massively important way...
- OFF BOARD
Annoyingly though, our hands-on experimentation with this side of the game proved to be a slightly wonky representation of how the final game should be. We were assured that by the time the game ships players will be able to enjoy a bug-free and seamless game with realistic collision detection to a degree. As it was though, our experience had moveable rails occasionally clipping through walls and other in-game items, often falling over and proving difficult to correct. Frustrating – but this isn’t even in its beta stage yet and EA is at least aware of and eager to fix the problem.
Still, even in this slightly borked state, the option to alter the position of items is incredibly useful and powerful. We did for example see one game journo set up an especially creative line of tricks with a long, straight rail leading up a lunch table and another down the other side, with a small gap between the two lines.
After a little bit of practice it was pretty impressive to watch people successfully do a brief 50-50 up first rail before hopping off, footplanting the centre of the table and nose-grinding down the downwards rail and ending the trick with a manual-to-handplant combo at a nearby bowl. Stunning.
This new ability to set up your own trick lines, combined with the still-present and improved Session Marker system from the first game which lets players set a checkpoint that they can reset to if they want, means that you can set-up some truly impressive challenges for yourself and then spend as long as you want refining them.
- Multiplayer
What’s interesting though is that in Skate there was lots of information gathered about each and every bail, such as how many bones were broken and so on. What there wasn’t though was anything meaningful to do with this information...until Skate 2 introduced the Hall of Meat mode.
Hall of Meat is essentially a turn based multiplayer game similar to the PC Dismount freeware games in that the aim is pretty much solely to cause as much damage to your skater as you can. You start in a set position, you have about twenty seconds and your score is presented as your hospital bill – the more bones you break, the better.
Admittedly, there are a few issues here in that the game is still presented without any blood to speak of, but that doesn’t matter too much. Self-violence like this is empathic; you can feel the pain without seeing the pain and you’ll have to trust us when we say that you will feel the pain. Once a pro-failer gets the controller then you’ll be white-knuckled, groaning and recoiling from the sympathy pains.
Unfortunately, Hall of Meat was the only multiplayer game mode we got to go hands-on with and although it is made all the cooler by the addition of victory poses and dives that you can put your character into as they career through the air, it probably isn’t wholly representative of the full multiplayer experience.
EA has mentioned the usual array of other multiplayer modes, each of which should be playable either on Xbox Live or locally and which include the likes of a HORSE variant and the usual score-based matches, but since we haven’t even had a chance to see them in action yet it’d be purely speculative to comment on them. Still, if they’re shaping up nearly as well as everything else we’ve seen, then we’re sure it’ll be awesome.
- Impressions
Keeping it simple, it’s fair to say that we liked Skate 2. A lot. An awful lot actually and it really did surprise us exactly how much fun we were having despite our ineptitude and the fact that we were bailing out faster than a sailor in a sinking ship.
Skate 2 isn’t an easy game to play at first, but it’s unfair to put the fault on the game there because the reality is that it’s difficult to play not because it’s badly designed or unintuitive, but because we’re just so used to playing Tony Hawk games instead. It’s like playing an FPS game using a non-inverted mouse and then moving to play a game which demands the mouse must be inverted. Neither view is wrong really, but getting used to it can be a bit difficult.
That said, it takes on an hour or two to get over this hump though and once you’ve done it the game rapidly opens itself up to you as an inventive and interesting take on skateboarding as a game. The ability to get off the board and move the furniture around also busts the entire experience wide open and gives players the chance not only to make their own tricks, but to actually enjoy the process of doing so and to be able to explore and pursue new goals as they do.
There are definitely a few bugs and issues to be ironed out in the build of Skate 2 that we played, but it’s remarkable how the game is still hugely playable and enjoyable already. The best thing though is that it’s obvious that it’s only going to get better from here.
I AM VERY EXCITED
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