Broken Bones & San Vanelona

I started transcribing today which is, of course, No Fun At All. I love interviews, and I love big, meaty answers with substance, and I got that from yesterday’s interview, but of course, it means a lot rewinding, relistening and retyping, since I’m one those journalists that rips out a digital recorder, puts it on the table and then just lets the guy GO. This, obviously, means a LOT of answer to get through. But it’ll be worth it.

But now let’s talk about the game to the left, Skate, developed by Black Box in Burnaby, BC, owned by, of all people, Electronic Arts, the Company That Can Do No Good. Except that miraculously, this time, somehow, against all my expectation, they have made something very good.

The story behind my sudden enthusiasm is a lesson in hype. Recently on the Playstation Store, free demos of both the latest Tony Hawk game, Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground and this game were made available. I downloaded both of course, but immediately started up the Hawk game, remembering how much fun I’d had with the first two, then recalling with minor sadness the gradual downward spiral the series had experienced over the years, getting needlessly complicated and clumsy to the point where I just ignored it. I thought maybe they might have recovered.

What greeted me upon trying that demo was a dark, gritty, somehow mean-spirited demo that calculatingly portrayed skaters as rebels fighting for freedom on the streets. It was an obvious, shallow attempt to “celebrate” skating as a cool, anti-authoritarian, completely non-commercial movement, that just happened to be filled with some of the big names in skating, and the now traditional, almost clunky Tony Hawk control system that hasn’t changed too drastically in the 8 years the game has been out, except to become even more ornate and unwieldy. A dark, gritty, New York-esque, crumbling sprawl from out of a decaying 80’s is what greeted me, with hard-nosed gangs of skaters that fought for territory and even each other as they struggled to “Skate because they couldn’t do anything else.” Throughout the entire demo, I kept getting the nagging suspicion that someone was whispering to me, “This is cool, this is anti-establishment, this rebellion, JUST LIKE YOU, brought you to by Activision. Activision, purveyors of fine software for cool kids, just $59.99 at a store near you.” It smacked of an incredibly obvious attempt to be “commercially subversive,” and I kind of resented it. It didn’t help that the game itself was just as Not Fun as I’d remembered previous versions that followed in the wake of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2.

Then thinking I was going to end up deleting the demo within minutes–’cause let’s be fair, this is ELECTRONIC FREAKIN’ ARTS WE’RE TALKING ABOUT, MERCHANTS OF SWILL–I booted up Skate, confident in my expectations that this was going to be an even more incompetent, badly conceived, clumsily executed, poor man’s rip off of the Tony Hawk games.

I was so damn wrong it’s not even funny.

I went into this game with zero expectations. Actually that’s a lie, I went in with full on NEGATIVE expectations, I was already hating it from the moment I saw that “EA HD” logo on the screen, because that logo has already become synonymous with unoriginal crap destined to be recycled for the next 20 years and people will STILL buy it.

Skate wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything remotely like that. I played the demo. The control system was new, fresh, fun and brilliant. It was one of those moments where you lay your hands on the controls, see how they’ve done it, and question “Why in God’s name have we never done it like this BEFORE?!” Somehow, Black Box pulled a Guitar Hero in that, despite the fact that is obviously NOT the real thing, they have managed to create a control system that mimics to a certain degree some of the basic mechanics of skating. When you want to crouch, you pull back on the right analog stick, to jump, just flick it up. To jump to the right, flick up from that couch slightly to the right. None of this hit “X” to auto-skate/crouch, and then release to ollie followed by steering the left stick around to maneuver in the air. Suddenly, just like a real skater, when you were in the air, the only thing standing between you and a bail was your own skill, a little luck and gravity.

Also, the demo took place in a sunny, fictional, California city called San Vanelona, a combination of San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona. It was a bright, beautiful town, perpetually drenched in sunset light, and it looked the kind of place you’d actually want to live. It was also, unsurprisingly, filled to the gills with advertising from actual skate companies and Adidas, who are major brand sponsors, and yet, somehow, because this is EA, I expected no less and it didn’t bother me; they, at least, were being honest with their crassness.

I played the demo, enjoyed the controls, played some more, and somehow ended up playing that demo every single day. This was the first time since I’d started messing around with Playstation Store demos that the intended purpose of the demo worked; instead of me playing through it thinking
“Glad that showed me what a stinker THAT title is,” I was hungry for more. I saw the gates locking me into the skate park with that whole town outside, and I wanted to explore it.

So when the game went on sale, on the same day as Halo 3, I surprised the EB Games clerks by buying Skate instead of The Big One, since they had lines of people wanting that.

Since then, I’ve been enjoying the game like no one’s business. The Wife loves it because she finds the constant abuse of the skater (which looks painful in the EXTREME) to be a source of never-ending hilarity. She’s actually cried tears of laughter at some of the accidents I’ve gotten my poor bastard skater into, and feels that so far this is one of the best purchases we’ve made based on sheer entertainment value for viewers.

I myself am really digging the game for a variety of the reasons. There’s that control I mentioned before, but there’s also the fact that unlike Tony Hawk they’ve really toned it down, and brought the game more to the level of a simulation. Tony Hawk games had gotten to the point where skaters were routinely grinding across an entire series of rooftops before careening off at sonic speed to bounce of flagpoles and eventually the tips of skyscrapers. In other words, Tony Hawk games had turned skate games into a ridiculously exaggerated parody of the sport. Skate made something as basic as grinding off a stair handrail difficult and just aiming for it, doing your ollie and STAYING on it was a major accomplishment in and of itself.

On top of that, there is an AMAZING online component to this game. You can play modes where you simply have a time-limit and try to score the highest within that amounted time by doing tricks, you can play with others at a designated spot, battling to see how can pull off the stunt at a dangerous location, or you can race to see who gets to a certain position first. You can play “ranked servers” in that your accomplishments go towards determining your overall score within the entire Skate community, or you can create your own “unranked server” to just mess around with friends.

But what I really love about this game is the built in video-editor. Skate is constantly caching roughly the last 30 seconds of whatever you’re doing, so that if you pull off a spectacular grind, or an even more spectacular accident, you immediately jump into “replay mode” and choose the exact length of your “skate clip” choose camera angles, drop in effects like B&W or sepia tones, change the speed for slow motion at critical junctures, and save your video. Then, at the press of a button, you can upload your video for the entire Skate community to see. In just a few short days I’ve seen some AMAZING tricks viewed directly from an in-game menu that connects you to the internet. It even has a feature called “SkateTV” where you can check into other games as a spectator, and see how other people are doing real-time, or even check in to see what the currently highest ranked skater who happens to be online is playing at that very moment, to see how he does it live.

The game’s not perfect, obviously. You can’t do handplants, a glaring omission, and for some reason, in character creation, you’re stuck with a male, they decided that girls don’t skate. Another irritating point is that you’re stuck to your board, so if you see a flight of stairs, you can’t simply get off your board and climb them, you either go looking for a ramp, or get up enough speed to ollie over them.

But these are minor issues, and, as horrified as I am to say this, you can bet that Electronic Arts will address them.

In the inevitable sequel.

Which I now know I will get.

If I had to review this game–which I’m actually kind of now regretting I didn’t get the chance to–I’d give it an 8.5 The game is a jewel with a few rough spots here and there that is already fun to play, but shows immense promise for a sequel. But I’m going to stop writing now so I can get back to playing. The Wife is cruising around San Vanelona right now on my behalf, looking for a gnarly ramp…