The skate. demo came out earlier this week. I think I have another game to buy in September.
I remember when Tony Hawk first came out on the Playstation years back and totally rocked our video game skating world. And for the past ten or so years that’s pretty much all we’ve had. And some iterations have been better than others, and later on in the series they got a little over-the-top and silly with some of the stuff. But the basic formula has always been the same.
I wasn’t expecting much from skate, and sure enough when I first started it up I was fumbling the controls all over the place. Years of using a button to ollie, and a thumbstick to kick off had ruined me. Suddenly it was all backwards. And it was confusing. But then once you start to get the hang of it… it’s simple, but complicated. Somehow.
I found that while (eventually) I was pulling off the same tricks I could do in THPS, when I did them in skate I felt like there was more of an accomplishment there. And also that I had more direct control over my skater. The controls have grown on me, and now I’m not sure I’d want to go back to just holding down a button to do a trick.
Additionally skate just seems to capture skateboarding more than THPS has (at least Project 8, the last one I played). I haven’t skated for a long time, since I was in high school, but the movement and physics of the board and the skater, and the sounds… just seems more realistic in skate.
Another neat feature is the skate.Reel function, which lets you record clips and save them online to show others. It’s still in beta I guess, and not functioning for everyone right now (myself included). Which is unfortunate, because I had a pretty gnarly 780 at the pool I had uploaded. But hopefully it’ll be remedied by the time the game comes out next month. Better to find the problems now, with the demo, then once people are paying for the game.
If skate has a decent character creator (which should be a given, since it’s put out by EA), then I will definitely find myself converting come September.
Remember that “Stop Shifting Blame” t-shirt I said we were going to reprint? Well I just got word that it’s in stock. And in a variety of colors this time, too.
I’ve wanted to some Player One and Player Two shirts for a while, but I didn’t want to just sell blue and red shirts with numbers on the front. Though I did want that to be a part of the design, so I was looking for something to put on the back. I thought maybe I would make large portraits of the character, and then use the color of the shirt fabric for the color of the shirts on the players. I messed around with some designs this afternoon.
Let me know if you like them/would buy them so I can gauge interest.