A few minutes spent wobbling on Tony Hawk RIDE's nifty skateboard and I was positive the night would end with an injury (and hopefully workman's comp). And I was right, sort of. It wasn't the skateboard though that knocked the wind out of me, but a whipping elbow to the gut from the ten year old next to me.
What I do for this blog.Last night, Activision held a modest launch event for RIDE in NYC's Hell's Kitchen. In attendance, Tony Hawk himself, along with a truck full of press and a bunch of kids sporting black hoodies and greasy hair. You can guess who met the game's physical challenge, and who was wheezing, self-medicating with Heineken Lights and bitching about how they did cross-country in high school. This guy.
But, achy or not, I was most certainly impressed by the experience. RIDE does, if nothing else, follow through on Hawk, Activision, and Robomodo's promise to deliver a metaphor of skateboarding experience.
Off the art alone, they have it. The skate parks, which span the broad spectrum of familiar Tony Hawk Pro Skater turf to a fantastic Godzilla-like miniature city-scape, should please fans wanting equal parts grit and humor.
And the modes, particularly the pass-the-board challenge multiplayer challenges, are incredibly engaging. At events like this, you typically see a majority of people lounging around or chatting. Here, people, from the youngest kids to 20-something women in little black dresses to 50 year old heavyset game journalists, were competing for top score. It looked a lot like those silly Wii commercials.
What's unclear, and what we hope to address in the review, is twofold: the precision of the board's control and its many sensors' practicality. The best players, while astounding everyone with two-minute combos down slalom courses, still looked to be whistling through a simple mold: manual, ollie, twist the board; manual, ollie, twist the board.I mean, if someone called out a specific trick, it was unclear it could be pulled off. Which ties in to a problematic: are all tricks created equal? The most difficult moves -- grabs and handplants -- involve reaching down to the board and placing a hand in front of sensors on the device's front, tail and sides. They're not impossible, but they take an extra-half second, that doesn't match the game's pace.
Again, and this is important, I only had a few hours with the darn thing. I wouldn't call myself a "Tony Hawk" of virtual skateboarding, so we'll so how complex these complexities are after getting more time with the game and mastering the virtual board.
However, and this is what shocked me, despite the learning curve or perhaps because of it, RIDE brings back much of the series' original fun. Learning the board felt eerily similar to learning the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater, like a déjà vu of freshman year high school.
RIDE is goofy, then frustrating, then familiar. If the precision of the controls does work, this is a most excellent game. If not, well, it's an interesting novelty.
We'll update you with a more in-depth review when we get our hands on a retail copy later this week. Then I can play it in my living room, safe from dangerous ten year olds with their kickflips and their rock music.
