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davidTaylor's skate. (360)
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| [February 8, 2008 11:40:32 PM]
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Entry #2
Gameplay:
In the first log I complained about some camera issues in the game, while the issues certainly haven't gone away, I did notice that when your characters get going very fast (going down a steep hill for example)your character goes semi-transparent so you can see what's directly in front of you. This was especially useful given that one of the challenges involves bombing down a steep hill and going through a fairly small area in order to hit a jump, without the transparency this challenge would be nearly unplayable as it is it's pretty fun. After I beat a few of the early challenges the city really opened up, I look forward to fully exploring all the sights that the city has to offer.
Design:
So far the level designs have been pretty good. All the areas I've visited nicely compromise between looking realistic while still providing lots of interesting objects for the player to skate in. I'm not totally sold on the control scheme, though. While I stand by my enthusiasm in the first entry, I'm finding very hard to perform some of the more difficult tricks with any regularity. This isn't a big deal in itself since the most difficult tricks are called the most difficult tricks for a reason, but it seems weird that if I make a mistake when trying to perform a specific trick that instead of crashing I simply perform a different trick. Speaking of crashing, I was impressed by the ragdoll in skate., rather than simply going completely limp upon crashing the movement of the players avatar actually looks fairly realistic. This can make some of the more bone crunching crashes downright painful to watch.
Much of the games gameplay comes from shooting videos. The player about 30 seconds to perform specific goals in order to complete the challenge. The interesting thing is that the player can start the video pretty much where ever they want. This adds a much deeper level of challenge to completing the video challenges since the matter of finding the right area becomes as equally or perhaps even more important than just being able to perform tricks. This adds a very nice non-linear exploratory element to the game.
One last thing, all the recycling bins in this game look like the helmet of the character from Timeshift. I found this really distracting for some reason.
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Feb 8th, 2008 at 23:48:11.
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| [February 8, 2008 11:08:23 PM]
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Log #1
Summary:
skate. follows the player as they try to become a world class skateboarder in the fictional city of San Vanelona. The player participates in various skateboarding related challenges such as performing high scoring trick runs, performing tricks for a photographer, and high speed downhill races races. The game is a much more realistic take on skateboarding than the Tony Hawk series, that said the game is far from an attempt at a hardcore skateboarding simulator.
Gameplay:
The game begins with a live action cutscene, I can't remember the last time I saw one of these outside of the Command and Conquer franchise. I like this game quite a bit. The camera angle is pretty low and close to the player which is nice an cinematic but it can be a little frustrating when I'm in a busy area since I can't really see a whole lot of what's directly to the right and left of me. The control scheme is pretty cool, rather than just pressing buttons to perform the various tricks, I need to perform movements with the control stick. While the movements hardly relate to the tricks performed it definitely gives a stronger sense of immersion than just pressing buttons. I participated in a head to head competition with some local skaters. The competition was interesting since all the skaters are simultaneously competing in a fairly small area, so I needed to really pay attention to who was around me at a given time. This simultaneously made the completion more interesting and complex in terms of strategy, but it also means that a great trick can be ruined by running into another skater which can be frustrating. This specific competition wasn't very hard so this wasn't a huge deal, but as the game gets harder I can imagine it could be very, very frustrating.
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davidTaylor's skate. (360)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 8 February, 2008
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