neorants

So lately I’ve been playing skate. It’s a skateboarding game, kind of like the Tony Hawk games, but better. Let me first say that if you had asked me whether it was better on the first or second day I played it, I might have expressed a somewhat different opinion, because the game’s learning curve is steep. The control scheme is called “flickit” and its name comes from the fact that most tricks are executed by pulling the analog sticks on the controller in one direction, then flicking them in another direction quickly.

The left stick represents your skater’s body, and the right stick the board. So, to do an ollie, for instance, you pull down on the right analog stick, then flick it upwards. Kickflips and heelflips can be done by flicking slightly to the left or right on the way up, depending on your stance. Anyway, now that I’m starting to get the hang of things, it’s a blast to play. The control scheme really lets you feel as though you have a degree of control over your skater not possible in the TH games, and the process of finding lines to ride in the city feels a lot less artificial, too.

One of the coolest features they added is the video sharing. At any point, you can go back and grab the most recent 30 seconds or so of skating and use a simple video editor to speed up, slow down, and apply some basic effects to the video, as well as change camera angles, then save your personal highlight reel to your hard drive. This is all well and good, but the sharing functionality is what’s really amazing. EA has set up a portal site and allow you to link up your XBox Live account (not sure how they handle PS3 players, but the same feature works for them too, I assume) to an EA account, and your console can actually encode your videos and upload them to EA’s site for people to check out in their web browser. This level of game/web integration is really something I haven’t seen before in a console game.

Once the video is uploaded, you can log in at the site and change the title, details, and tags so people can find it more easily, or send the video to your friends via e-mail. It’s a cool feature and a viral marketing ploy all in one. :) Very clever.

To that end, here’s a link to a film I captured last night. If the site asks you to select a language, then kicks you to the landing page, just follow my link again and it should work.