Skateboarding video games are back (still). Pt 2 of ??? - Skate.
We've talked about "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater". Now it's time to talk about "Skate", the OTHER big-name skateboarding franchise. And maybe some other games.
So. As I touched on in the first part of this series, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Remastered is a pretty great game. In a nutshell, it combines the mechanics of later games with an extremely faithful recreation of the first and second games’ iconic levels. The soundtracks aren’t completely intact, but Activision preserved as much of them as possible through licensing and licensed a slew of new tracks that fit right in with an official iteration of the Pro Skater series.
I made sure to use “official” there because as we all know, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 doesn’t exist and never happened. Do not speak of it again.
We’re on the cusp of a new console generation, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X hitting in the near future. I mention this because I wanted to point out that no matter what console you decide to buy, if any, there will almost certainly be an excellent skateboarding video game on it.
The “console wars” are heating up, too. People are loyal to the brands — Sony or Microsoft — and while I primarily do my gaming on PC, I do really adore my Xbox One X for one simple reason: I can play Skate 3 on it whilst it’s upscaled to 4K resolution with a great framerate and online play.
Backwards compatibility is a very important feature for me, someone who erratically jumps back and forth between Skate or Die! for the Commodore 64 to Skate 3 for the Xbox 360. But Skate 3 is the key there, because if it’s even possible, I love the Skate franchise at least as much as the Pro Skater franchise.
So what’s so special about Skate, then?
I wrote a lot of words about how good the Skate franchise is at SB Nation. At the time, Skate 4 still hadn’t been announced. It was figurative torture — despite the surging popularity of the Skate franchise when Twitch streamers picked it up, EA refused to announce a sequel to Skate 3.
That changed in July 2020, when EA finally announced a new game in the Skate franchise. It’s not officially Skate 4, but it might as well be.
Nobody knows when the new game will release — it could be at any stage of its development for all the public knows. That means a 2021 release is optimistic and a 2022 release is probably more realistic, if not 2023.
Skate was a game that, at first, appeared to be a sanitized, realistic version of Tony Hawk. But it was immediately fun and silly, with a decent story mode featuring several professional skaters and lots of THE GOOFS. Also, wrecking into things was fun. Stupidly fun. There was even an entire set of challenges around just absolutely wrecking your shit as badly as you could. — Me, for SB Nation
There are a lot of people raising completely legitimate concerns about a new iteration in the Skate franchise. It’s difficult to know which developers are actually working on the new game, and what ties they have to the first three games in the franchise. Developing a successor to Skate 3 is an insanely tough ask of any development studio, and that’s probably part of the reason EA was so reluctant to green-light a sequel.
But a sequel, or something like it, is coming. And if there’s one feature that absolutely needs to be in there, it’s the Hall of Meat.
Just absolutely wrecking your shit
As I mentioned in the quote above and in the SB Nation piece, crashing in Skate is brutal and hilarious. Again borrowing a .gif I made for the SB Nation article, you can see this poor lady — just minding her own business — getting her entire world erased when my skater (who is a loose approximation of me, but far less fat) bails right into her face.
There were whole challenges based around bailing as hard as possible, breaking as many bones in your body as possible, and doing it with style. That was the Hall of Meat, and if the Hall of Meat is not in the next game, I will throw a fit. A monstrous and huge fit the likes of which the world has never seen.
If I spent 1,000 hours skating a single line, I easily spent another 1,000 hours wrecking my in-game body for laughs.
You mentioned other skateboarding games?
So there’s a new Pro Skater game that rules, you can still play Skate 3 online if you have an Xbox One, and smart money is on a new Skate coming out within the next two years. But I said that skateboarding video games are back, and that can’t be true if there’s really only two primary games to play.
But it is true! Because there are more than that. You may not have heard of them, but Skater XL, a game heavily inspired by the Skate franchise, released in July for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Then there’s Session, also heavily inspired by Skate, which is out now in Early Access on PC.
I’ll have a lot more to say about both of those games next time around, but there’s another one, and it’s the dumbest of the bunch. Don’t take that as an insult — I’m talking about Skatebird, a game about little birds skating as well as their tiny bird legs and wings will carry them.
Screenshot credit: Glass Bottom Games
I also wrote about Skatebird for SB Nation, back when it was trying to reach a goal on Kickstarter. It did reach that goal, and I’ve been following its development by Glass Bottom Games closely. It’s a game about tiny birds (Tiny Hawk, anyone?) trying their best to shred as hard as they can.
Next time …
As usual, I rambled a lot today, but you should have an understanding about what makes the Skate franchise so special (especially if you click through on all the links, which you have to do, legally). You should also know that there are some other heavy-hitting skateboarding games out or coming out soon.
Part 3 of this feature will dive deeper into why I’m so excited for Skatebird, what I think about Skater XL now that it’s seen its 1.0 release, and my impressions of Session. a game that appears to still be unsure of what it wants to ultimately be.
Part 3 will hit your inbox Soon (TM), and you can also expect some 49ers content, more NFL weekly picks, and something on Blitz: The League in the near future.
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Stay tuned and stay safe, friends. <3