Skate 2

I tried skateboarding once. I got on the board and tried to go forwards, immediately fell off, repeated the process a few times, got bored and angry, eventually hurt myself quite badly, decided skateboarding was not for me, and packed the whole thing in forever after about an hour. So I guess if Skate 2's mission was to create a realistic approximation of what skateboarding's really like, they only thing they forgot to do was punch me in the face.

That actually might have been preferable, now that I think of it.

I just cannot understand for my life of me how and why this series managed to supplant Tony Hawk's Pro Skater as the game of choice for this sport when it treats the notion of 'fun' like a disease, like something to be avoided at all costs. The most interesting thing you'll do in this whole game is landscaping - and I'm using the most generous term possible for 'grabbing hold of a dumpster and moving it from here to there'. The fact that it's glitched to absolute fuck might be amusing if it were a better game, but when you can fall off your board going downhill and stare at a screen for a full three minutes as your characters repeatedly hits the same tree over and over and over again before the game gets bored and crashes, it becomes pretty clear that this game should never have been released in such a terrible state. Not that it would have been better without the glitches, necessarily; at least they occasionally complete a mission for you so that you don't have to go through the tedium of doing it yourself.

I get that some people might have wanted something a little more realistic than THPS. That's fine. What's not fine is creating a game with absolutely no sense of flow. What's not okay is creating a game where you have to get off your board every time you want to go up a staircase, or even a curb (a curb that half the time you can't even see is there). What's not okay is a game where the button to gain speed on a halfpipe is the same button that makes you come off the halfpipe and bail. What's not okay is a sparse open world design that forces you to manipulate objects to create decent lines, effectively asking you to do the work that the developers should have done in the first place.

And you know, this all seems to stem from the idea that the Tony Hawk's formula has become stale. It hadn't. It really, really hadn't. Underground, Project 8, and Proving Ground were all solid, gradual improvements on a basic game idea that had retained all its strengths throughout multiple iterations and generations, gradually becoming more and more challenging without losing its instant appeal, while remaining easy to pick up for a newcomer. Skate doesn't have that - I can't imagine too many newbies being too enthralled at the idea that the controls for 'ollie' and 'kickflip' are damn near identical, not when it means falling over every time you try to jump up a small step and accidentally pull off a trick instead. (And did I mention that the camera is controlled by the same stick you use for tricks? Yeah, thanks for that, that's not awkward at all.) It actually feels like it was designed for something other than a console - because almost everything is done with either of the joysticks, you could play this with the controller for a remote control car and barely notice the difference. Lord knows what all those buttons on the controller did to annoy these developers - game pads, from any console generation, are designed to make it easy to press the main buttons, be they ABC on a Mega Drive pad or square, X, triangle, and circle on a Dualshock controller. Skate 2 decided to take the avant-garde approach of making those buttons effectively useless, and then awkwardly adding them in later when they decided that pushing forward on the left stick wasn't enough to go forward (fucking hell, seriously) and that you should spend half your time running around carrying your board, because that's exactly what everybody wants when they buy a skateboarding game.

Woeful. Honestly an absolutely awful approach to a genre that had been reliably producing great games for years, with so many awful decisions made during its creative process that it almost starts to feel like a parody of a computer game. Brain-meltingly bad. I guess it wouldn't be so galling if there was a current alternative to this, but right now it looks like the Skate franchise has all but killed off one of my favourite genres, and that elevates it from an embarrassing dud to an absolute tragedy.

2014 edit: thank God for OlliOlli I guess!

2016 edit: and thanks for the second patch of THPS5 too! Sorry Skate - you tried, but you failed.