I liked the Tony Hawk games back in the day - but after Tony Hawk 2, I did not get a chance to play a skateboarding game again until Tony Hawk's Project 8. Project 8 was a lesson in frustration for me - As I saw it, the game more or less expected you to be a Tony Hawk master, and playing the game was, right from the start, an up-hill battle. The level of skill the game expected you to have and the amount of stuff you were supposed to "know" about the franchise and how its mechanics worked was pretty overwhelming. I just barely managed to unlock the Fun Park in Project 8, the final area of the game, and I never wanted to touch it ever again.
I played a ton of the Skate demo and tooled around the full version for a little bit. I really liked what they had done and there was a general feeling of, I dunno, "freedom". And now that the Skate 2 demo became available for us Silver users today, I decided to give it a go:
(if the video does not work quite yet, come back later )
There is something about the demo that rubs me the wrong way. The worst part is, I can't even really put my finger on it. Maybe it's the fact that the area in the demo is so small - the Skate Park portion is less than half the size of the original demo area for the first Skate, and in general, feels very cramped and tight, like there's not a lot of room to move around. And speaking of moving around, even that's giving me trouble - I seem to be wiping out more than I did in the original Skate and I can't get the air or the momentum going that I used to (WARNING: That is old webcam footage. If there's enough interest, I'll re-download the original Skate demo and record footage of that to better prove my point). There's also a demo timer; the demo for the original Skate let you go on for kind of a long time if I remember right - something like 30 minutes, I think. The demo for Skate 2 gives you five minutes, and you can extend that to around ten minutes if you complete the tutorial and all the challenges quick enough.
The small size and the short time limit don't exactly give you a lot of time to fool around. I always figured the 30 minute limit in the previous demo was to help show off the skate.reel function, where you could upload 30 seconds of footage to the official Skate Website. This demo seemingly retains that functionality, but without much time to really mess with the controls or stretch your legs in the skate park, there's not much use to it, if you ask me. Even worse: You have to sit through the entire introductory scene every single time you boot up the demo. Just the opening monologue is a good two minutes long. That doesn't exactly encourage replayability. I'm sure somebody from the peanut gallery is going to say, "It's a demo, cheapskate! Buy the full game!" - yeah, well, that's the thing. I wanted the original Skate - but I don't really know if I want Skate 2.
In general, the controls feel... tighter. Which should be a good thing, but I can't help but feel that this is a bad thing. They almost feel too rigid, or something, almost like a Tony Hawk game. The trick system has been tightened up so much that it doesn't really feel like the gestures I'm doing are what's pulling off tricks - it feels more like I'm miming a motion on screen and my Skater does something tangentially related. There's a serious disconnect now that wasn't there in the original Skate. The replay editor is also suffering - it has tons more depth, and that's great, and all - more depth for that stuff is nothing but a good thing - but reviewing footage quickly isn't as easy. In the original Skate, popping open the replay editor and reviewing your footage from multiple camera angles was a snap. I'd frequently pop in to the replay editor just to watch a bail I just did in slow motion and that was awesome. In Skate 2, you have to wrestle with several sub-menus, zooming options, panning options, and holding down the bumpers to modify certain button functions. I'm sure some people out there are going to use this new-found depth to create fantastic videos, but in turn, they've actually made me avoid opening the replay editor.
I guess what this boils down to is it feels like they simplified certain elements too much but alternatively they went and made certain elements more complicated than they needed to be.
And, even if there are visible improvements to the game otherwise, I don't think I like it.
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