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Friday 8 February, 2008
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.
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