Skate It

Jul 7, 2008

Last year's Skate won honors as GameSpy's pick for Sports Game of the Year. The secret was in the controls: Mastering even basic moves like ollies and shove-its required some practice with the controller and spot-on timing. By using the controller thumbsticks to simulate where you put your feet, the game really captured the feel of skating, as well as the style and attitude.

With some tweaks and adjustments, the franchise is coming to the Wii and DS, and once again, it's all about the controls. The new title is called Skate It. For the Wii, gamers will have the option of using either the Wiimote or the new Balance Board peripheral. During a recent visit to EA's Los Angeles campus, we got our hands (and feet) onto both for a little bit of old-school grinding.

Skating With a Flip of the Wrist

Using the Wiimote to control a skateboard is actually surprisingly straightforward. You simply point the controller at the TV and hold it level, imagining that the controller is the deck of your board. Want to do a manual? Easy, just lean the controller backwards, just as you'd shift your weight back on the board. Keep going. Pretty soon, you'll start riding on your rear two wheels. Lean the controller forward to do a nose manual.

Time to turn? Just as you'd do on a real skateboard, you can tilt the controller left or right to ease into a gentle curve. Rotate the controller more than 90 degrees and you'll do a boardslide. To do an ollie, just flick the controller up in the air; flicking it with the nose down will do a nollie.

The full 30-trick range of the original game is available from the Wiimote, almost all with wrist flicks. For instance, tipping the controller to the left while flicking it up will do a basic kickflip instead of a normal ollie. Doing the same gesture but swirling the controller up and to the right may do a pop-shuvit. Confused? No worries -- building up some speed and then randomly flipping the controller all over the place is a surefire way to pull off some kind of trick. Just be sure to land it.

A few minutes with the Wiimote proved that the control scheme was surprisingly intuitive. We had a little trouble with stringing tricks together on the half-pipe, but pulled off some great stunts on level ground. As with the original Skate, timing the moves and doing exactly the tricks you're aiming for is tricky but enjoyable.

Exploring San Vanelona

The city of San Vanelona is the setting for Skate It, but it's quite a bit different from the vast, seamless open-world city in the original Skate. For one thing, it's been decimated by some sort of un-named disaster. During our demo time we visited some familiar locations, like the library, that had been torn apart and destroyed.

For another thing, the city is divided up into smaller lots that have to be unlocked, a much more traditionally linear approach to gameplay that works better on the Wii hardware. Each lot is a self-contained section of the city with plenty of goals to achieve. Complete enough missions and you'll have the option of moving to the next lot. As in the original game, you're following the whims of your snarky cameraman and trying to make a name for yourself in the skate community.

While the city may lack some of the finer, up-close detail that you see on the other versions of the game, San Vanelona still looks terrific. Shells of torn-up skyscrapers flank the horizon and there's no shortage of ramps and rails and half-pipes scattered throughout the environment.

Skating with the Balance Board

Finally, we couldn't resist giving the Balance Board a go. The Balance Board is placed sideways on the floor, and that's how you stand on it, as though it's a skateboard and you're facing your TV. Unfortunately, you need to have the Wiimote in your hand even if you're using the Balance Board, since you need to press the "A" button to push your board along and you use the d-pad to switch tricks.

Basic skateboarding moves are completely intuitive on the Balance Board. Leaning side-to-side steers the board, just like on a real skateboard. One time we found ourselves sailing toward a huge stairway and we frantically and instinctively leaned way back -- our on-screen skater did a powerslide and came to a stop, just as we'd intended. Pretty cool. Even cooler is doing a manual; Just lean your weight toward the front or back of the board and after a while the wheels will pick up off the ground.

You're not supposed to take your feet off of the Balance Board, and of course you're not supposed to jump on it, but that's really hard once you get into it. Abruptly shifting your weight and pressing hard on the back of the board does an ollie. Pressing the corners of the board with your foot does tricks. By default, slamming your weight to the rear-right of the board will do a kickflip, for instance. Pressing a direction on the d-pad when shifting your weight unlocks the full 30-move arsenal of tricks, but that's where the Balance Board starts to get a little counter-intuitive.

While it might be hard to string together the perfect set of moves on the Balance Board, we did have a lot of fun tooling around the city with it. We found it was very hard to do grinds (the timing had to be just perfect), but easy to do manuals or to string moves together with manuals by carefully adjusting our weight when landing. It may not be the perfect way to control the game, but it sure was a lot of fun.

The original Skate was a favorite here at GameSpy headquarters, and we're glad that EA took the time to really go back to the drawing board and figure out how to make the most out of the game before porting it over to the Wii. Whichever of the two control schemes you try out, you'll be learning to skate all over again.