NIDZUMI+

It’s true Skate 2 is official, it is happening. Fine, maybe it wasn’t that much of a shock but the point is that a great game is going to get its greatly anticipated follow up. The thing with Skate, the original Skate, was everything wrong could easily be improved. The amount of times I said to myself “Skate 2 is going to be awesome” was ridiculous. That’s not to say the original was a bad game because it was far from it but there was room for improvement. Here’s what should be in Skate 2…

Walking
Often while cruising along you would fine a nice looking spot to trick down. The game would then make you Ollie up it for no reason when a normal person could just step off the board and walk onto the ledge. Thats why the ability to walk and climb would prove to be indispensable. Fine this didn’t do to much to Tony Hawk’s but Skate is much more of a chilled out kind of a game where walking would fit in perfectly.

Refined Trick Stick
The way you perform tricks in the world of Skate is a key factor in what makes Skate pop but sometimes it was a bit too picky. It needs to be heavily redefined so that it’s easier to pull off the right tricks when it asks you to. I guess some of the skill will be taken away but there are ways around that.

Technical Improvements – Frame Rates
This applies more to the Playstation 3 version instead of it’s 360 counterpart but there were frame rate issues. This seems like a little problem but it greatly effected the Playstation 3’s rendition.

Technical Improvements – Loading Times
Although something that effected both versions indefinitely were the load times. There was a good 90 second wait before you even got to the menu and once in the game you would really ride your luck on using stunt markers because it was really hit and miss. I don’t know the math but say you where 10 meters away from your stunt marker, you would be fine. But if you stepped over to say 12 meters you would have to sit watching for another 30 seconds when it would have been quicker to skate back.

More Tricks
It wasn’t that there was a shortage of tricks or anything but there is something wrong when you can do backflips and 900’s but you can’t do any lip or flatland tricks. Alright, maybe you could do some lip tricks but you couldn’t do any hand-plants or anything especially fancy and the addition of flatland would make for some nice transition’s while in between rails and jumps.

In-Depth Story
The story was realistic and it fit the purpose and the last thing this game needs is a villain of some description. All I’m saying is that it needs to be bigger and better and have more of a storyline instead of skate this, win that. It seemed a bit weird having a long intro where something happened to your character but it was hardly ever mentioned throughout the rest of the game. As long as they keep it believable it will do fine.

Custom Clothing & Boards
Really this could be summed up with the simple phrase ‘Make it like Forza’. Although every game needs something like this, custom clothing and board designs would make each character unique online and add that extra level of customization. Adding this might take away the fact that I wanted to buy more clothes and update my characters look and thats the first time anything like that has happened in a long while. Although I still retain the fact that if allowed to create clothing and gear, I would tweak my character even more.

With pretty much every review ending in ‘the sequel will be awesome’, Skate 2 has a lot of expectation but with a few of these ideas and a few surprises, Skate 2 could be the game that the original always wanted to be. Buttery.

What would you like to see added to Skate 2?