I don’t know how it’s happening but for some reason Microsoft seems to be discounting all of the really good video games that I love. Last week it was Dark Souls. This week it’s Skate 2.
Skate 2 is currently $6.58 and it is a super great video game. In fact, it might be one of my favourite games ever. I love it so much that I spent the best part 40 minutes talking about it in a podcast devoted solely to that game.
It’s an old game, I suppose. But I’m sort of keen to see how it holds up. I suspect it holds up excellently. After the less-good-but-still-quite-cool Skate 3, I’m not sure if we’ll ever see this series revitalised. I hope it does get a new entry into the series at some point, but now is as good a time as any to relive one of the best sports games ever.
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23 responses to “Skate 2 Is Super Good And It’s Currently $6.58 On Xbox LIVE”
I dreamt about buying a new deck the other day… I’m 33 and haven’t skated since I was 20…
Totally unrelated…. but yeah…
Get back on it!!
Do it! Never too old to have a roll.
Additionally I went to my parents house this weekend to move some furniture and the old man was using my boards as trolleys. (post dream)
I can’t get back into it… I remember how quickly it trashed your shoes. I can still see so much road rash scarring on my left arm and left back. So much pain…
As someone who spent 10 years off a skateboard and then went out and bought one in my late 20’s, I can tell you that falling off hurts so much worse than you remember.
All that lean muscle that use to drop and roll comfortably out of a bail has been replaced by pudgy tissue that just splats on the road then stops.
Still a lot of fun (and better exercise than you remember), but I wouldn’t be trying anything too ambitious until you’ve had a practice stack first.
I’m in the same boat, I stopped skating at around 19 and kind of started up again a good 10 years later.
I have definitely resigned myself to skating flat ground and curbs/manual pads and the occasional park/mini ramp session. But it’s still fun just to bomb hills and pop some flips every now and then. I think i miss the exploration part the most, just getting out in the city and finding out new spots, hanging out in weird places trying to get a trick and enjoying the scenery. Ah nostalgia…
Also what the hell happened to skating? This stuff kids are doing nowadays was inconceivable back then! The technicality and sheer scale of some stuff is just insane.
Yea shoes copped it pretty hard. Good thing is now i can afford to buy new ones instead of just shoo-gooing them back together until the next trip to paddys market for some knock off DVS!
It’s a shame we probably won’t see a XBOX One/PS4 skate game. It’d work perfectly with the PS4’s sharing and the XBOX One’s new dynamic challenge achievement system. Having a disc-less skate game optimised to get you from pressing play to in-game would make a fantastic game for playing on a whim while things download, install, etc.
But that would be a smart idea. This is a the games industry, smart ideas are discouraged!
Loved Skate 2. The online was awesome.
I’m pretty sure this was the one where both my gf and I flipped our shit on due to the retarded control scheme. You need to do some ridiculous R-analogue-stick down-up movement to even ollie, or something. In any case, I almost broke a couple grand worth of gear due to massive rage buildup.
It was the most intuitive and skill based control schemes of the lot haha.
Ha, could be. It’s just that every single other skating/bmx game didn’t have stupid combos to even get a basic ollie going. I dunno, we played it for almost an hour, it just didn’t click.
But that’s what made it so great. Skate didn’t have combos. You didn’t hit Down+X+Y to do a kickflip animation, you just sort of mimicked the way you shift weight on a skateboard. It’s less about smashing in a predefined code mid-air and more about controlling your deck in the moment.
It’s not like actual skating, I’d say it’s more like fingerboarding, but it’s like Guitar Hero/Rock Band in that even though it doesn’t require the same skill set as the real world equivalent it still requires a fairly unique skill set of it’s own that’s rewarding to hone.
I’d say it’s more like a skate-sim, rather than a straight up arcade game like the Tony Hawk games were.
It was a great system for most things (ollies and basic flips were super satisfying), but I swear to god I’d hit some of those more difficult flip tricks more often by randomly launching myself off things in real life than I would in the game (and I can barely do a kickflip).
I suppose it’s the nature of the free-trick system but hitting a move which means rotating a stick from 6 to 1 to 4 to 7 perfectly and within half a second with any consistency was infuriating.
I had a hard time when i started too, but it quickly became so incredibly intuitive it was more like “why didn’t anyone else think of this??”
Heh, alright. I guess I’ll give it another shot one day. I think what compounded the rage was that we were taking turns doing arcade challenge mode or something, so not enough time to mess around to handle the controls.
If you treat it like a skate-sim and just roll around and explore the city then you can have all the time you want, and be able to tackle obstacles that are easier, rather than be forced to do crazy challenges.
I found that after getting used to the general feel of it the challenges actually helped me get a handle on more difficult or confusing tricks (360 flips, inward heels etc). I also spent the better part of an afternoon working out how to flip, turn 180 then manual and flip out, it takes some getting used to but is so rewarding once you do it right you just want to land it again and again.
Skate 2 is probably the best overall as it is just one massive city, whereas Skate 3 has 3 distinct zones that aren’t joined, but it handles a bit better than 2.
Only played Skate 3 which was fun. Give us Skate 5. Just skip 4 and go straight to 5.
I’ve been tempted to pick up Skate 3 since it seems to have generated a few fun Let’s Plays on Youtube lately. Skate 2 for $7 doesn’t seem like a bad deal.
Skate 3 is cool, I love its colour pallet and slightly expanded trick list (like darkslides) but the city just isn’t as good in my opinion and the skate parks are not as fun as Skate 2’s or as numerious. However that’s probably because Skate 3 came with a custome skate park builder that I never took advantage of, so there is probably some really awesome community made parks out there.
I reeeeeally hope they make a Skate sequel, especially with the PS4/Xbone power it would be amazing.
I’ll just keep making parks and skating them by myself then… sniff…