Skate 2

[The_Disturbed_One]

Skate 2, the sequel to Skate, is a free-roaming skateboarding game produced by EA Games that was released on January 21st this year. The first installment was released on September 14, 2007, and brought some new aspects to the skateboarding genre previously dominated by the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. Skate 2 adds some new features to the series, but still holds true to most of the first game's revolutionary items.

Okay, I was a fan of THPS from the time the very first one came out on the N64. Ever since the games started being released on the 360, PS3, and the Wii, I found the original gameplay that I fell in love with almost completely gone. So, needless to say, I quit playing skating games. Even after the original Skate was released, I was still bitter from playing the last Tony Hawk game, so I didn't play it. I had a friend of mine tell me that this newest installment was actually pretty fun, so I picked it up and gave it a go.

Skate 2, while still not as good as the older-style THPS games, did have a lot of aspects I enjoyed, but also stuff that pissed me off almost to the point I was at when I played Too Human and had to watch that damn Valkyrie lift up my corpse over and over and over and over again.

First, the ability to use the right stick for basically all moves was pretty nice, almost giving you the feeling of actually skating. However, unless you played the last game, you're going to find the controls to be extremely unusual and will probably end up on the gravel 90% of the time. This actually leads to probably the greatest thing in the game, wrecking.

Wiping out while on your board not only looks excruciatingly painful, but actually gives you money, which you can use to purchase new boards or clothing, based on if your wipeout accomplishes certain goals. (10 broken bones, 3 flips, fun stuff like that) Okay the bad. Walking is possibly the worst aspect of the game and the controls for walking are f'n terrible. It will piss you off any time you have to get off your board to move a ramp or a dumpster. Now the thing that made me the most furious was the career mode. The difficulty of the goals you must accomplish goes from child-like easy to the hardest f***in thing in the game. Anyway, let me wrap this up.

I played Skate 2 on the Xbox 360, but it was also released on the Playstation 3 console. Overall, it was a decent game and I would recommend it to people who want to play a skating game on a next-gen console. But if you want to play a great skating game, pull out you PS2 and pick up THPS3 or THPS Underground. I give it a 7/10.

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Yeah I thought the same thing about the game. Skate 1 is the same thing as well and is decent and a good idea but I will take anything THPS 3 or earlier any day. American Wasteland was the last real good THPS game to come out and is one of my favorites.

I would love to find someone who could play me without quitting on THPS though. I had a ton of challenges throughout college after they all heard I won all of the local competitions for the game in my area then all of them quit within 30 seconds of the two minute time limit. Even the competitions were not a challenge for me. I could wrack up an easy 15 - 20 million in one combo on THPS 3 or American Wasteland and I could wrack up an easy 5 - 10 million on 2, and an easy 1 - 5 million on the original. I would always get one combo going and make it last the entire two minutes + around 4 minutes after the official time ended. After I practiced with the first game the sick level of the others was so easy it was unreal. I did find it funny that with all the new moves they added throughout the series allowed you to be able to increase your score by multiples of 5. THPS 4 was the only one I really sucked at because it had the crappiest levels to skate in and in that game I was lucky if I wracked up a score of a million but I usually ended up with just enough to cover the sick score.

The Skate games were fun but for first time players to either of them the controls are going to get on your nerves really fast. I practiced for over 6 hours just trying to get used to the joystick and I nearly gave up on the game after that. The game is fun but unlike the THPS series I found these games had zero replay value in my opinion.

[hippie pieces]

I think they need to tone down the complexity of both games or at least include an arcade mode. I know these games were huge and had impressive sales but I thing simpler controlling games would sell better. Of course overly complicated skating controls have been around since 720° came out in the mid eighties.