Red Bull House of Skate
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
Ever wish you were a teenager again? Your chance has come if you do, because Red Bull House of Skate has come to town. This new personal space is definitely designed with the young in mind, both in the concept of the space and game and in its rendering. It just shouts California, dude!
I was able to experience the space at a friends the day it came out, and I must say that it is a great bargain for the $4.99 price tag. Not only do you get an aesthetically pleasing environment, you get a game that both you and all of your friends can play. It is a single player game, but it has many choices to make it a unique experience for each player. You can customize your skateboard with many choices for your wheels, trucks, grips and decks. There are two different types of game modes, challenge mode which covers all of the trick areas of skateboarding like grabs, grinds, speed, lips, ollies, manuals and flips. Then there is the Score Attack which is time based and has several difficulty settings: easy, medium,hard and expert levels to complete in different time frames that range from one to five minutes in length.
There are leader boards to follow what your friends are doing and a statistics board to keep a handle on your own accomplishments through the game. It also has a tutorial area and instructions built in, so you can get used to what is expected of you. Here is a video one my friends and new Home Community Volunteer King_of_Games30 allowed me to use to show you what the game is like.
There is also a cute Red Bull mini-game in the Red Bull machine that nestles down in what could be considered the party area next to the skateboarding game. It is very reminiscent of Simon, except you have to remember a series of button pushes to win rewards. I won a Red Bull can ornament and a hand item as well on my first try, though I can tell the game will get increasingly harder as the speed of the additional button pushes increase accordingly.
Now on to the personal space itself. It is fairly large in size, and this seems to be a trend in many of the new spaces being created for Home. I am so glad they increased our furniture limits, for without that increase many of these spaces like the Dream Yacht and this one, as well as many of the older ones, would seem empty. You arrive in a front door area with graffiti on the walls and some nice track lighting.
The door itself leads out to the Red Bull Illume public space, a nice touch. Stretching out before you is a large room with built in wood shelving and huge louvered windows and tinted glass walls. It is very open and light feeling and I liked it immediately. The ceiling above is high with long lights coming down.
Off to the right is the small room with your first of three video screens and a burned in couch. It has a black and white city scene painted on its walls, but it is just a passage into the party and gaming area ahead. Here there is a nice sized room with graffiti and your Red Bull skateboarding and machine games. There are twelve picture frames to be used in this space and seven are found in this area, though two of them cover up some of the graffiti on the walls. A friend of mine used some of the neon art available and we found that it didn’t cover them so much, it actually added a nice touch to the space.
If you look to the left as you enter, you come to an open doorway that leads to the stairs and another nice sized room. This room has several skateboards displayed on the wall, along with a bit more of the graffiti displayed throughout the space. There is one more picture frame in here, but it too covers some graffiti. This seems like a good bedroom space to me, but others may feel differently.
Just past this doorway is an open glass door that leads to a lovely tiled patio that overlooks the Hollywood Hills below. The scenery is well wrought with even a touch of smoggy haze laying over it as though you are near Los Angeles, this actually adds to the real feeling of the space.
Up the stairs made out of skateboards and grinding bars you find a roomy area with a mesh wall on one side and brick walls on the other, one brick wall has the second video screen you find in the space, and the other has a Red Bull logo on it. There is a big open area perfect for a living room and a doorway that leads to an indoor balcony that gives you a different view of the skateboard gaming space below. I only wish we could actually see our friends skateboarding below when the game is being played; now that would have been really rad, as the kids might say.
The other side of the upstairs room is a smaller area that could be used for anything you like with an open tiled balcony that holds the built in hot tub. The tub holds three people and sports another of the video screens in the space attached to it. The videos playing there are all about the Red Bull professional skateboarding tours that traverse the country each year.
The ceilings above are a blend of mesh gratings and wooden beams that seem to be open to the sky above. It helps to keep the airy light feel of the living quarters and I think they did a great job here. I like this space a lot; it is a fantastic addition to the spaces in Home and an amazingly good first space for Red Bull to come up with. They have upgraded all of their public spaces in Home recently as well, it is good to see them once again taking an interest in our community and the fact that they have made this very neat gaming space for us as well is very cool.
- Nice open floor plan.
- Airy feel to the space.
- Beautiful scenery below you.
- Amazing mini-games to play.
- Regular picture frames cover graffiti.
- A bit too much graffiti for me.
January 8th, 2012 by Burbie52 | 3 comments
Burbie52 is a 62 year-old published author and founder of the Grey Gamers group within Home. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived there her entire life, with the exception of a twelve-year residency on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys reading and writing, as well as video games, especially RPG's. She has one son in his twenties.
Very cool looking space and that mini-game is impressive! We are getting so many new things with personal spaces I bet there is a large population of Home that will pretty much avoid public spaces completely.
The list of things to DO in your personal spaces has grown considerably this past year!
As always, great writeup Burbie!
my biggest regret with this space (and generaly most of the minis-games)
gamers are “invisibles”! it should be so funy to watch our friends on skate area…
devs, please think of that feature, WE WANT PLAY WITH OUR FRIENDS!
If Your a Tony Hawks Game fan, then your going to pick up and play the mini game a lot faster than those that haven’t played those games. like the laid back feel to this apartment and its one of those places i really COULD see myself living in within the Real World.
I DO agree in that I would like to watch my friends play the game and perhaps see a scoreboard. If this was a two player take turns type game that would make it awesome too. Spaces like this need to be more sociably interactive too.
Bodacious article Burbs!