Skate It (Wii)

When skating games stop getting fun start getting real...
12/1/2008 7:32 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Performing tricks with the Balance Board isn't a piece of cake, either. Pulling off anything other than a simple jump requires a good deal of pressure to be placed on the edges and corners of the Balance Board. Ideally, this would just require a quick shift of balance to one side or the other, but in practice it often required me to pick up a foot and absolutely pound on a corner of the board, sometimes lifting the opposite corner off the floor in the process! Not exactly a carefree experience, and one that was particularly frustrating during competitions.

Aside from the controls, the realistic simulation from the original Skate has been retained for this follow-up. You won't be guiding your character through mile-long grinds or 1,200-degree mid-air spins in this game. Instead, you travel through a generally interesting variety of skating areas -- including an impressive earthquake-ravaged city -- stringing together minor tricks into depressingly dull videos and photos. While this focus on realism is probably exciting for experienced skaters, for others it's just as likely to cause boredom. In the Tony Hawk games, the reaction to a gigantic string of tricks is, "I can't believe I just did all that!" In Skate It, the reaction is more likely to be, "I can't believe that's all I did." I couldn't help but feel that the experience in Skate It wasn't that different from the one I could have by simply buying a skateboard and hitting the streets.

Of course, that real-life learning experience would leave me with a lot of bruises and broken bones, which gets to another problem with Skate It -- the frequent, bone-crunching falls from the board. When you watch edited videos of impressive real-world skaters, you don't usually have to watch the dozens of punishing, failed takes that led up to that perfect run. With Skate It, though, you have to play through each one of these bone-crunching bails. Every time you land too hard from a high drop, or hit a grind pole at a slightly wrong angle, or catch the edge of a curb with the corner of your board, you go flying off the board in slow-mo black and white. The game fetishizes these spills into a "Hall of Meat" that highlights your broken bones. But while these spills are occasionally fun to watch, they usually get in the way of the action. The long, slow seconds you spend watching the black-and-white bails are seconds that you're desperately jamming on the buttons, trying to get back to the action. Again, the realism gets in the way of the fun.