While these eyes may never see credits, they’re certainly ready to witness a lot more of what this game has to offer. I haven’t exhausted my energy with Skate 3 in a mere half an hour. Oh definitely! I don’t much care for the ‘selling skateboards’ story setup, but as long as the focus remains on kickflipping the boards and not, just… flipping them, I’m happy to ride this one out. The entire cutscene serves as a great “hey, don’t take any of this too seriously because we sure won’t” disclaimer. It’s fun and feels shockingly earnest from a company like EA. The opening cutscene (filmed in live action) dives straight into the silliness with what’s essentially a montage of real-life skating figures goofing around a pretend construction site. For all its merciless gameplay and realistic physics, the game’s unashamedly goofy as hell. Oh, and when I say “victory”, I do just mean “successfully pulling off any trick other than any ollie”. Needless to say, I was terrible, but my constant failures made the precious few victories genuinely rewarding. Just like real skating, it takes a lot of practise to achieve anything other than sucking. In just half an hour, he fell victim to enough misjudged ollies and overzealous stunts to fill up an entire ‘skating bail compilation’ YouTube video. The character too was far weightier than any other skating game I’d played before, and my own created character, Billy Stankwater, suffered as a result. The aforementioned right stick-based trick system, indeed, wasn’t a world apart from Olli Olli’s arcadey skating shenanigans, but it was far less snappy. Very much the kind of simulation I was expecting, at least in gameplay terms. It still was going to be far from easy-I knew THAT much. Having played Olli-Olli, which adopts a similar system, I felt confident in my ability to navigate that particular learning curve without too much difficulty. I was also vaguely familiar with Skate 3’s right analogue stick-based trick system this wasn’t inherently alarming to me. I expected a simulation, one that would seem, frankly, a little off-putting to me and my Pro Skater sensibilities. I fully expected Skate 3 to take this inkling and smack me over the head with it until I was bloody, bruised and begging for the warm embrace of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and its multi-dozen trick combos. The older I get, the more I suspect that-maybe-there are one or two elements of fantasy to this notion. Growing up on Tony Hawk’s games taught me that skateboards are, for all intents and purposes, wooden flying carpets stepping onto one instantly gives a person the ability to perform miraculous acts of gravity-defying aerial acrobatics. This time I went for the Xbox 360 version of Skate 3 (played on Xbox One). Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half-hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. In each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never tried before. Articles // 2nd Aug 2020 - 4 years ago // By Jamie Davies So I Tried.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |