SKATE 2 - first look

Then there are other ways of taking back the city. The same buttons still make you grab your board, but one button’s been redefined as the grab-the-world button. In trick terms, this means it’s what you use for inverts – EA will only offer a nervous ‘no-comment’ when we ask if you can skitch off the cars buzzing around the city – but once you’re off the board, it takes on a new dimension. Anything that isn’t obviously made of concrete or bolted to the floor can be dragged around, rotated or placed virtually anywhere – from park benches and picnic tables to medium-sized skate rails and funboxes. It’s a more organic version of Tony’s create-a-park system – in that you have to move objects yourself – but if anything, it’s actually more versatile. If you’ve got the patience, you can drag a table halfway across the city and up into the hills. If you think it’ll make a good line, you can angle a bench up a flight of stairs or drop it into a river.

This will also feature in finding new areas – on one millionaire’s boat, we could just see a disused swimming pool on deck, but had no way of reaching it... until we noticed a disused sun lounger on the prow. One quick drag-and-drop later, we cannonballed – yeah, you can do that too – into the pool and got the biggest airtime we’ve managed in SKATE so far. This is the sort of thing that’s going to be huge online, with people making elaborate furniture sculptures for crazy SKATE Reel videos – but will you be able to band together to lift larger objects – cars, say? “No comment,” says Cuz. Which means they’ve thought about it, right? “No comment,” repeats Cuz firmly.

And that secrecy is the theme with pretty much everything else about SKATE 2. EA aren’t saying anything about SKATE Reel – except that it’s expanded and improved – nor are they talking about downloadable content nor the game’s other levels. They won’t confirm the game’s new line-up of pro skaters, although Danny Way’s bound to reappear (while John Cardiel, Eric Koston and Ray Barbee are rumoured). In fact, they pretty much leave us to the game, playing around and tumbling off our board as we go for more and more elaborate tricks off higher and higher stuff. No doubt about it, SKATE hasn’t gotten any easier. If you want to do those bigger, better tricks, you’re going to have to improve your timing and accuracy, line things up better, improve your skills. The city might be less skater friendly, but that’s the sort of challenge we love.

Q&A: Scott Blackwood, Producer, EA Black Box

The Tony Hawk series has taken a year off to have its engine updated. We imagine that’s down to you…

We didn’t make SKATE because we wanted to take out another skateboarding game – we just wanted to make the game we wanted to make. Tony Hawk’s is a great series.

Hawk has had to add loads of ridiculous tricks just to keep things fresh. Do you think that’ll be a problem with SKATE?

Skateboarding’s a ridiculously huge beast, and with the original SKATE we just scratched the surface, so with SKATE 2 we’ve pushed it a lot more. I think we’ve managed to stay true to the culture and that’s the main thing.

We noticed a couple of the team have scuffs and bruises. How many of you actually skate?

When we started the original SKATE we were a very small team and about half a dozen of us skateboarded. Then those of us who didn’t got into it. It’s a big part of the culture of our team – it’s something that we do quite regularly. We have skateboarding nights where we have thirty or fifty people who come along and we rent an indoor park so they can try it out.

It shows in the way that you play the game and think, ‘Hey, I know how to skate now’...

Yeah, I’ll play the game for an hour or two and think I’m much better than I really am, then I’ll get on a skateboard and hurt myself. It’s like a good driving game, you play it and feel like you can go 180 mph…

How do you think that’s helped the game?

Well, we didn’t put any polish on the game at all until we had something that felt right. We lived in wireframe for a really long time until we had something that we could give to anybody.

Apparently a lot of new levels are based on real skate parks...

Yeah, we have level designers, video editors and producers that are skateboarders. We had to travel a lot promoting the game, so the guys on the team would call up pros and go ‘hey, I’m coming to town, can you take me somewhere skating?’

What’s the coolest thing you’ve see in SKATE Reel?

The most amazing thing is how people get around limitations. In SKATE we kept the camera centered on the player, but people found a way around that – they used editing tools and had one person lie down in a coffin so they could film from different angles. There are videos of skate teams where skaters come in from angles that… I’ve got no idea how they did it.

Have you ever injured yourself on a board?

Yes! Horribly! I was skating this huge vert ramp, just going back and forth to fakie. Then I got to the top – higher than I’ve ever been before – and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go back fakie or kickturn to come back down. I ended up doing neither… well, both… and my knees sort of went separate directions. I couldn’t walk for a while. As a 33-year old man, I probably should have gone to the doctor, but that’s not really the skater way.

Aug 18, 2008