Seriously, didn’t EA shut down the Black Box offices or something last year.
Anyway, I’m thrilled that it’s not the case and that I’ll get to play a new Skate game. I love these games more than I’ve ever loved a sport game. Even the venerable Tony Hawk games, before they turned to crap, don’t come close.
They did close the office but merged the team in with another nearby office.
I’ve played Skate 2 a ton so far this year. I just need like 3 more pro phone numbers and a few other odds and ends. Amazing game but I’m not sure I want to dive right into 3 so soon.
Agreed. There was a lot of content in #2 based around a gameplay that doesn’t significantly advance once you grok the basics, which leads to a really long game lifetime for me. I fire it up, mess around for a couple of hours, don’t make significant progress, and turn it off for another month. It’s just not a game that really needs a yearly iteration.
There was a lot of content in Skate #2 that was really, really, really hard. I’m looking at you, pro challenges!
I’d fail at the tougher ones for half an hour and then I’d just find a spot somewhere and do tricks for an hour or two.
The hardest two (the one where you have to manual, and “how do you spell GIRL”) both have exploits. You can use the exploit on GIRL to beat all the pro throwdowns, but it just gets stupid and boring.
The only pro challenge I really have trouble with is the one that requires you to flip onto the ledge, grind a picnic table, then do a varial 360 flip off a stairwell. It’s also afaik the only challenge that requires a specific trick, one that’s kind of flaky to pull off.
The only challenge I haven’t beaten is that stupid GIRL one.
YES! That one.
Yeah, I really hope they’ll keep SKATE out of further iterations. While it may be kind of fun against other human players, it’s just too restrictive (as it only counts rotations and basic trick, not all the cool things like no complys one foots and grabs) and seriously unfun against AI-controlled players, who really don’t have a problem doing the 540 nollie varial heelflip you just pulled off.
I dunno, I’m feeling in the mood for new places to skate, exploring the city was always a highlight of the series. That said, there’s just so much updating they can do to a game that is already near-perfect without a hardware upgrade. This generation of consoles is getting a bit long in the tooth.
Oh, when I wrote SKATE I meant their variation of HORSE, not the whole game.
Plus, in Skate 2 at least, if you just bring up a table or banister or anything in front of the spot you’re supposed to hop, the AI can’t handle it (that’s the exploit for GIRL). But even if they fixed that, I’d argue it makes things worse since you have to deal with an AI that can do whatever it wants.
FWIW Skate 3 drew a big crowd in the exhibition hall at the Penny Arcade Expo. Was the x-ray views of injured bones on nasty impacts a part of the first two games? Lots of group sympathetic cries of pain whenever someone would take a particularly bad fall on the big screen.
There is a screen with all your broken bones highlighted after the more hefty bails, yeah. There are even challenges attached to it: Break everything from the hip to the toes etc.
In honor of Skate 2’s impending obsolescence, I put my feeble video editing skills to work making a compilation of clips I made demonstrating my feeble Skate skills.
So sad when i hopped on live this morning only to realize the demo is coming out on the 15th.
I’ve only had the one quick play of the demo but I really like it. Off-board controls are a zillion times better and it was easy enough to get back into the swing of controlling things. The annoying camera lens edges are gone (from the main mode) as well which is great. I’ll have to give hardcore mode a try tomorrow, it’s too late now. Demo is on a 20 minute timer, btw.
Picked it up yesterday, enjoying it even though it’s more of a series of challenges and an open landscape (not that Skate 1 was some sort of immersive skate-rpg). Love the new area though and that it’s under no illusion of being a “real” city so every area has all kinds of fun stuff to trick off of. The new system of taking the oldschool super-specific trick challenges and making them the “bonus” objectives and letting you do almost any general trick in their place for normal points was a wise decision as was the ability to have a sane camera angle.