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Disneys Extreme Skate Adventure

By Jeff Shedden and Larry McCormick

Before we get into this, you’ve got to realize one thing about Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure: it’s a kid’s game. Sure it may use the Tony Hawk 4 engine, but if you’ve already finished elementary school then you’re not this game’s target audience. Since there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the versions of the game, we bring you a joint review on the GameCube version.

Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure reeks of effort. Toys For Bob did an amazing job of making the characters come to life. Each character moves exactly like you’d expect them to if they ever managed to find themselves on a skateboard. Woody wobbles, Timon and Pumbaa work together, etc. And there are a lot of characters: four for each Disney chapter and then the Create-a-Skater, who has his or her own level.

The designers picked an interesting batch of levels, too. The levels are taken from Disney fare such as Tarzan, Toy Story 1 & 2, and The Lion King. The Toy Story levels are hands down the best. Skating through Andy’s room and Pizza Planet was just too cool for words. The rest of the levels were appropriate as well, but in some cases suffered from an awkward layout, plus its easy to see areas where it could be frustrating for the younger set.

The game plays basically like Tony Hawk 4 in that you skate around at your leisure and talk to supporting characters to get your goals. Most of the levels have some character specific goals which diversifies it a little, but for the most part we stuck to one character for each set of levels. The goals should be familiar to Hawk fans as well as they include reaching a certain amount of points, collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E, performing tricks at certain areas and the like . There are some oddball goals as well, such as rescuing Hamm from a toilet in Andy’s bathroom.

Stat points are distributed around the levels, and when you get a new stat point, it applies to all characters, not just the one you’re using. One problem is that each character starts with no special moves and you earn them (each character has four) by going on this horribly repetitive scavenger hunt. Scattered across every level are 25 tokens which you have to collect to open a special move. You have to repeat this for every character and even kids will probably find this tedious. There is also a real lack of goals in general. We’d have liked to see a lot more character specific goals added to round out the gameplay a little more.

If you choose a Create-a-Skater, you’ll skate around a “real world” level called Olliewood. It’s populated by a handfull of weird denizens who are, well, kinda stupid really. We’d be willing to go so far as to say that they’re a little patronizing. Olliewood is also home to the most blatant product placement ever seen in a videogame. Two goals come to mind. One has you go to a McDonald’s and deliver “tasty” treats to the various characters. This was bad enough, but then Nokia threw their two-cents in.

The Nokia goal has you going around collecting the most annoying ringtones in the known universe for this guy who has set up a little kiosk in the street. At the beginning of the goal he makes it a point to tell you he’s looking for these ringtones for his Nokia 5100 mobile phone (exact words), and after collecting the ringtones we fully expected him to tell us all of its features and then explain to us that the Nokia 5100 is available at fine retailers everywhere and that our parents don’t love us unless they buy us one. We felt dirty after completing this goal, and not just because of the horrible dance the characters do to the ringtone song at the end of the goal. You have to see it to believe it. The closest comparison is, say, watching someone afflicted with Down’s Syndrome and Parkinson’s Disease trying to direct traffic.

The controls have been changed from Tony Hawk to accomodate younger players. It’s basically set up to have one button tricks instead of using all of the face buttons in tandem. However, for those of us who prefer a little challenge, there’s an option to set Pro controls, which handle pretty much like Tony Hawk always did. A few of the more “pro” moves were removed from the game, such as the fastplant or the wallride, but manuals and reverts were left in, which is a little odd, considering those are always a little harder to time correctly than wallriding or fastplanting were.

Another annoyance is that when you do unlock special moves, you can’t remap them. Each character also has a very limited number of grab and flip tricks which correspond to the simplified controls, but seems out of place with pro controls. Remember, it’s a kids game.

Visually, the game truly stands out. I would even go so far as to say that Disney Skate Adventure looks far better than Tony Hawk 4 did. The character models are outstanding, the framerate is solid, and the animation is fluid. The levels are well designed and are a blast to explore. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it feels like being in the actual movies, but it does feel like being in the movies if the movies were about skateboarding. I hope Neversoft was watching. The Tony Hawk series never looked this good.

The music, well that’s another story. Every single tune in the game (with the exception of that sad, sad nokia tune) is pure Radio Disney bubblegum fare. No thank you, that’s why we have custom soundtracks. Obviously, the GameCube version doesn’t allow you to rip your own tunes as the Xbox version does so if you want music playing in the background you’ve got to listen to extremely annoying songs. Not only that, not one song included is actually from any of the movies that are the source material for the characters and backgrounds.

Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure turned out be a pretty solid title and we can only hope that if a sequel is made it will address the few problems it suffers from. We can’t really recommend this to anyone over 12 years old, unless you happen to be a massive Disney fan. But if you’re a parent or have a younger sibling that you don’t hate, you’ll have fun playing it with them.

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Tags: Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure

Posted by Larry McCormick on Nov 13th, 2003 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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