PlayStation 2

Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure

Kids love skateboards. Kids love Disney. Kids love video games. Put them all together and you have a winning combination, especially when coming from Activision.

Imagine you're riding the rails, pulling wicked 720 spins and backside indies. You race down into a bowl and come up to a handplant. You're just tearing it up, and then you realize something. You're Buzz Lightyear on your rocketboard skating through Andy's Room! Then you're Pumbaa and Timon riding a piece of wood through the desert past Pride Rock. Or maybe you're a Young Tarzan on a mask running the gambit at the Tree House him and his friends found. It's the first time a major skateboarding games comes together with the epitome of kids licenses. This is Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure!!

As a longtime fan of skateboarding, I have played most of the skateboarding games released over the years and written a great deal about them. But one needn’t be a virtual-skateboarding addict to realize the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series has forever changed the way gamers and game companies view skateboarding games. Indeed, most current action-sports titles borrow from the Tony Hawk formula and usually employ some sort of gimmick to grab attention.

"And all this time I thought it was an act! Come on guys, it's the REAL Buzz Lightyear!" "You're mocking me, aren't you?" "Oh no, no...Buzz look at alien!" (Buzz turns around, then realizes there's nothing there.) "Hahaha!" Who could possibly forget classic moments like that? Disney has been making memorable animated motion pictures for more than half a century. Most recently Pixar has continued Disney's tradition of masterpiece filmmaking with the release of Toy Story 1 and 2, A Bug's Life, Monster's Inc., and Finding Nemo.

When you make something successful, natural instinct tells you to tweak it, modify it, and abuse it until the idea becomes stale and derivative. This is not an uncommon practice in the games industry, and it's one we'd like to see fade away to an extent. But sometimes a fresh take on a old idea can make for a fun, if not familiar experience, as is the case with Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure. Is this a shameless milking of an already dried-out license, or is it a game that caters to a specifically different crowd and effectively brings the Tony Hawk experience to a new and more diverse audience? We'll go for the latter.

What this all boils down to is a solid and intuitively controlled skating game that is optimized for younger players but also quite fun for fans of the Tony Hawk series. The colorful cast of characters goes a long way to make the game feel like a one-of-a-kind experience and the simplified control scheme ensures that frustration will be kept to a minimum. If you can’t wait for Tony Hawk’s Underground and want to take a spin around a few new levels, then Skate Adventure is certainly worth looking into, but if you’ve got a younger sibling who enjoys these sorts of games but just can’t quite get the hang of it, then Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is a no-brainer, in more ways than one.

Si vous avez déjà terminé les derniers volets de Tony Hawk ou que vous n'êtes pas forcément attiré par Disney, vous pouvez facilement ôter un point ou deux à la note finale. Pour les autres, Disney Extreme Skate Adventure est un bon jeu de skate, simple d'accès et à la réalisation réussie.

In a sense, strategy is dead for the console world. Many companies have attempted to create a following across different platforms in hopes that there's someone out there that owns a console and likes to put their brain to work from time to time. But due to the PC's broader range of releases in the genre, which can be both played online and are easier to control using the mouse pad, consoles have ultimately failed as a contender in this share of the market.

When you combine the Disney license with sports, a lot of pretty terrible games come to mind. Plenty of weak Disney Sports games have been released that run the gamut from football and basketball to skateboarding. In what appears to be a textbook example of "that was then, this is now," Activision has released its own Disney skateboarding game, named Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure. By taking the engine that powered Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 and combining it with kid-friendly characters from recent Disney films, developer Toys for Bob has created a game that can be enjoyed by kids and adults alike.

Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure is a solid game for younger children, but one that won't really appeal to anyone else. If there were a few more levels and a create-a-park it would skew slightly older, but alas it has neither. Anyone looking to unlock cool movies will be sorely disappointed as each movie clips is ruined with one of the game's songs playing beneath it, rendering them completely unwatchable. It's a great gift for a younger sibling, but if you're old enough to have enough money to purchase your own games, it's not for you.

All told, I don't really think this is a game for kids. The licenses are mocked by being "dumbed down" so much that a six year-old would think they're stupid, the gameplay is sterilized of depth without actually removing all difficulty, and the entire thing can be summed up as one giant attempt to exploit anyone that buys into the title for money. No, this isn't a game for kids. This is a game for money-grubbing business executives looking for another audience to take advantage of. I have nothing but pity if that audience is you.