Skate

Mar 2, 2007

Electronic Arts held a little get-together last Tuesday evening at which the gaming press was invited to partake in the company's first foray into the skateboarding genre the 1980's PC classic Skate or Die! Developed by the fledgling EA Black Box (based near Vancouver), I was particularly keen to see how the game was coming along after being somewhat disappointed with the latest Tony Hawk offering, Project 8. While still in a fairly early stage, I was most impressed by the direction that Black Box has taken the skating genre, focusing on freedom and creativity rather than single-button-instigated combo chains. Of course, all that freedom to create new and exciting ways to fracture an elbow doesn't come cheap, so you'll have to expect to spend some time actually learning how to skate in Skate.

When I was plunked down in a fairly barren (albeit magnificently rendered) skate park, I really got a sense of the open-ended philosophy behind Skate. There I was, in a big open area with a few different skate-able features to trick off of, but no set agenda. Granted, the finished game will undoubtedly offer a bit more direction, but the vast expanses of concrete flatland positively reeked of possibility. I was roused from my musings by the shocking fact that I wasn't moving. My skater was just standing there, ready to skate, but not actually going anywhere. Pushing on the analog sticks had no effect except to turn him around or make him lean. If this had been a Tony Hawk game, my guy would've already been racing around at breakneck speeds... what gave?

Push It Real Good

In its relentless pursuit of realism and accuracy, Black Box has made pushing a little more challenging by requiring you to actually press a button in order to get your skater going. The idea is that you need to be thinking about your feet all the time. Consequently, by pressing the A button you'll push with your right foot and by pressing X you'll push with your left. The longer you hold the buttons down the harder you push, so just rapidly mashing the A button gets you next to nothing in terms of speed. To achieve serious velocity, Skate demands an intriguing mix of rhythm and force; you need to hold the button long enough to get a nice good push, and you need to do it at regular intervals to maintain your speed. While this may sound disconcerting, in practice I found this feature served as a way to ground yourself in your skater's shoes, jacking your consciousness directly into a skating frame of mind. See, in Skate it's not as simple as hitting the Y button to grind, you've got to put some thought into what you want to do.

This theme is carried over into the execution of tricks, but here things seem a little simplified. If you want to do an ollie (the industry standard for getting air), you just hold back on the right analog stick and then quickly punch it forward. The right analog stick is an analog, so to speak, of your feet, so by pulling the stick backward, you shift your weight to the back of the board in preparation for an ollie. Then when you flick the stick forward, your skater will pop the board up with his back foot and slide his front foot forward to execute an honest-to-goodness ollie, just like a real skater would. I was informed by one of the devs shepherding me through the demo that these are not just canned animations, but actual physics calculations being done in real time, which is pretty staggering when you think about it.

The rest of your arsenal of tricks is similarly enslaved to physical laws. In order to perform a kickflip (like an ollie except that the board does a little twirl on its way into the air), you simply tweak the same motion you did for the ollie by pushing the stick slightly to the right or left, mimicking the movements made by the feet of your skater. Similarly, manuals (riding on one end of the board so that one set of trucks and wheels raises off the ground) are accomplished by leaning on the right analog stick. It's sort of like preparing for an ollie, but never actually executing it. The resulting connections made in my brain while learning this control set-up seemed to embed these movements into my sense memory, making them practically second nature and, more importantly, a basis for creative experimentation.

Once you know how to push, ollie and perform a manual, you can pretty much do anything. Want to grind that rail? Well, just do what actual professional (and amateur) skaters do: ride up to that mother and ollie right up onto it. Balance is maintained with the left analog stick, which is analogous to your body and generally controls which direction you face. Usually, holding left or right on the left stick changes your direction, but if you engage a braking powerslide (by pressing and holding the B button) you'll shift your skater's weight and flare the slide. By the end of my hands-on time with Skate, I wouldn't say that I was skating like a pro exactly, but the basics were all there and I was bailing in some intensely advanced ways that played hell with the ragdoll physics (which, I must admit, was almost as satisfying).

Screenshots, Or It Didn't Happen

Of course, you could perform the most exotic trick imaginable, but it doesn't amount to a hill of beans unless you can provide proof of your exploits. Skate handles this by enabling an instant replay feature accessible by pausing the game. Choosing "Replay" will enable you to rewind the footage and rewatch anything that you've done. You can then edit the film, add music and export your video online to show your skating prowess to friends. In what is sure to become the mantra of Skate: "without footage, it's fiction."

In the absence of the notorious Hawkman, Skate still features a robust lineup of boarding bros. Danny Way, Mark Gonzales, Rob Dyrdek, Mike Carroll, P.J. Ladd, Chris Cole, Jason Dill, Pat Duffy, Jerry Hsu, Paul Rodriguez, Dennis Busenitz and Tommy Guerrero all make appearances in the game. I can't pretend to be familiar with any of those names (except maybe Tommy Guerrero), but if you're totally into skating, maybe the big names will leave an impression on you. The only thing I really cared about was the skating itself, not the skaters, but if someone was going to give me pointers on how to thrash a wicked session, I'd want it to be the pros.

By the end of the event, I wouldn't exactly call Skate a Tony Hawk-killer, but I wouldn't shy away from a little innovation in this stagnant genre. By making the tricks challenging to perform, Black Box has also made it possible for you to genuinely feel like you've accomplished something when you do them. You won't find the kind of unrealistic uber-tricks that other games tend to focus on, but the feeling of skate boarding is there. From the pushing mechanics to the "Flickit" board-handling, Skate looks like it could just be the breath of fresh air for which many skating fans have been gleaming the cube.