Wii ‘Skate It’ Controls Are Good In The Way That Annoys Some Gamers

vashivihan · 05-15-2008, 01:32 PM

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Whether you would enjoy “Skate It” on the Wii depends on how you feel about Wii games that can be played using what I can best describe as motion-mashing.

It’s like button-mashing, but involves swinging the Wii remote.

Shake the controller any which way while playing “Skate It” for the Wii and good things happen.

“Skate It” adapts the controls of EA’s 2007 game “Skate” fo the Wii’s motion sensitive remote. Players hold the remote in front of them, imagining that it’s a skateboard. Tilting it down or up tilts the boarder forward or back, rotating slightly left or right causes the board to turn, flicking the remote up causes an ollie (a jump), and various combos of tilting, flicking and rotating trigger basic tricks. Two buttons are used for grabs and acceleration.

I expected the controls to be challenging when I tried it Monday night at an EA event at the Supper Club in San Francisco. Visions of EA’s “SSX Blur” and it’s demand that I draw complex patterns precisely in mid-air flashed into my mind.

But “Skate It” is not that tough.

The game’s producer Mike McCartney challenged me to do an ollie and a manual. I flicked and then tilted down. It worked perfectly the first time.

I started shaking the remote and found that good things happened no matter what I did. That’s the quality gamers love or hate about a lot of Wii titles.

The game is pre-Alpha. It’s early on. The skate park where the demo was set was a desolate version of the one in “Skate.” The storyline justification for its emptiness is that a disaster just hit town. I asked McCartney if the development team was just accounting for the Wii’s limited horsepower, but he said the idea came from watching YouTube videos about surfers who seek out hurricane-rocked waves.

The Wii version is a little more colorful than last year’s game, a concession to the system’s more casual audience. And it won’t support video uploading, something McCartney said was less of a priority than getting the controls down.

Skate It (click for larger image)The game’s development team at EA Black Box started integrating Wii Balance Board support into “Skate It” a few weeks ago. A prototype implementation was demonstrated briefly by a developer. Steering and manuals are activated by leaning and pressing on the board with your feet, as you would on a real skateboard. Powerslides are triggered by a sharper lean — or at least I read so in a preliminary schematic that was on display at the event.

Players using the Board will still need the remote for some controls. Also, players using the remote and not the Board will have the option to plug in the Nunchuk and do steering with the analog stick.

The Wii game and a DS version are set for release in the fall. No connectivity is planned between the two.

EA also announced this week that “Skate 2” is in development for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

this game is def on my buying list. linkage