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Disneys Extreme Skate Adventure

This was one of those games that kind of snuck up on us at E3 this year. It was a novel idea, to boot. Disney had a skateboarding game before, and it pretty much sucked. So why not go to the source? Disney licensed the Tony Hawk 4 engine and let Activision publish this title, so it must be a solid title, eh?

Well yes and no, although the “no” isn’t exactly fair. Before we start, let me remind everybody that this game was designed to appeal to the younger audience, and it’s obvious. I’ll address each point seperately, but yes, it’s a kid’s game. If you’re looking for a suitable game to tide you over until Tony Hawk Underground, you’re out of luck. There are a few legitimate beefs I had with the game, but the rest can be chalked up to it being a kid’s game. Seriously, I had to keep reminding myself this.

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: 4 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 boil down to several each of 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 the layout was a little awkward, and I could see places where it could be frustrating for the younger set.

It plays basically like Tony Hawk 4 did, 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 I found myself sticking to one character for each set of levels. The goals are mostly familiar too, in that there are goals to reach a certain amount of points or collect the letters S-K-A-T-E. There’s some oddball goals as well, such as in Andy’s Room, you have to rescue Hamm from a toilet in Andy’s bathroom.

Stat points are distributed around the levels as well, 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. This was the major gripe. 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 is just tedious, even for kids. There is also a real lack of goals in general. I’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. I’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 I fully expected him to tell me all of its features and then explain to me that the Nokia 5100 is available at fine retailers everywhere and that my parents don’t love me unless they buy me one. I 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 thing that was a little annoying as well is 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 corresponds to the simplified controls, but seems out of place with pro controls. This is one of those times I had to say, “Kid’s game, Jeff. Kid’s 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 on the other hand was another of those things that had me reminding myself that it’s a kid’s game. 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. I don’t need to hear why L’il Romeo is a pimp when I can have Iron Maiden screaming at me while Baby Simba does his thing. I was, however, disappointed that there isn’t a single tune from any of the movies on the soundtrack. Once again, the custom soundtrack comes to the rescue. There’s a big difference between skating around the Elephant Graveyard to a Smashmouth song and skating around it to Alan Rickman singing “Be Prepared”.

Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure turned out be be a rather fun and solid title with a few flaws that I expect to see fixed for the hopeful sequel. I 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 Jeff Shedden on Oct 2nd, 2003 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox 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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