Skate It

Skate brought skateboarding games back from the depths of the ridiculous and the unrealistic that the Tony Hawk games damned them to. That's kinda funny; Tony Hawk has been working all these years to make skateboarding a valid sport, bring it positively into the social consciousness, only to ruin it all with a few poor sequels. Anyway, Skate It is the game Skate ported to the Nintendo Wii and DS, and I'll be reviewing the DS version.

First of all, I'll admit it: this game has DS graphics. Second, that doesn't bother me at all. If it bothers you, maybe branch out to the Wii version. Now, that being said, I think it's safe to say that the graphics don't alter or lessen the experience very much. My motto is, and has always been, gameplay over graphics. So as long as this port has the gameplay, then to hell with the graphics. Game could look like Pitfall for the Atari and I wouldn't care, as long as it played well.

So does it play well? Hell yes it does. The controls are handled with the stylus. On the touch screen of the DS, you'll find a diagonal skateboard. This is how you initiate the tricks. To push, you hold the stylus on the touch screen to the right of the actual board, OR, you get smart and change the controls, because it can be kinda buggy. I changed mine to holding up on the D-pad, which still allows you to steer perfectly. So onto tricks. I don't wanna go through all of them, but I'll give you a basic idea of what to do. Use the stylus to slide across the board on the bottom of the screen, and you will perform a trick. Slide it straight up and you'll perform an ollie, the basic jump. Slide it up and off either side, you'll have done either a kickflip, or a heelflip. Pretty simple. The only problem is accuracy. It's not terribly inaccurate, but sometimes when you try to do just an ollie, it'll end up as something else. Unless you have time to physically take your attention away from the situation at hand to watch yourself draw a straight line across the board, at certain times it can be hard to do just a plain ollie. This goes for most of the other tricks, however the shapes you draw for other tricks leave more room for error than a straight line does. Now, I'm not saying that the game is bad or that it doesn't work, it's just sometimes you'll end up doing a trick you didn't mean to. Aside from that, hold your stylus on the board and you'll crouch. Drag and hold from the tail of the board back and you'll manual: do the opposite for a nose manual. You can also hold L or R to do a grab trick.

The physics in the game are actually pretty good. It's pretty easy to get air if you do it right, and grinds latch on rather well. The engine that runs the game really gets the job done. The challenges are just that: challenging. And there are tons of them to keep you entertained for weeks. The replay value of this game is really high, also, because you can go back and do whatever tricks on whatever obstacle you'd like. It's really fun to try and pull sick lines like you see in Video Daze and The Reason and all those other classic skate videos. It's not as detailed or innovative as Skate was, but it's definitely a solid port to the DS.

5/7