You can adjust the sensitivity of the board within the game, but if there's a sweet spot, it's damned hard to find. Getting to stand up, lean in and out of turns, and press the board with your feet to perform flip tricks - how fantastic. Let's get the balance board out of the way, because it's obviously the first thing anyone will try should they have one. All three sound so ideal - either the Wiimote held as a representation of the skateboard, or the balance board literally stood upon. Or, perhaps most excitingly, with the balance board as the skateboard. You can control it with only the Wiimote, or add in the nunchuk for analogue steering. I like to pretend he's fallen from a plane here. Along with the news reader's nonsense, it's a great sketch. During a news report explaining the earthquake, there's diagrams in the background titled "artist's impression", drawn in crayon as if by a six-year-old. But oddly it rarely shows up after the intro. Nor are there in Paris, Rio, and various other world destinations you zip off to. There's no traffic in the city, no people, nothing that moves. The game is still about getting good photographs and videos to impress sponsors, and making your way to being a pro-skater (seemingly helped by there being no other skaters alive, other than mysterious phone calls from unseen pros). The skater-creating tools are all but gone, replaced with picking, say, one of two body types, or from five almost identical heads. A skater's post-apocalyptic playground in jaggedy Wii graphics. The resulting damage is a city primed for tricks and grinds, fallen bridges and piles of rubble propping up opportunities for making lines. There's been a terrible earthquake in the hometown of San Van, and apparently it's killed everyone but you, some unseen pro-skaters, and an incredibly annoying idiot on the phone. If you've played Skate, you might be expecting a living, breathing metropolis to skate around. Whether the Wii just isn't capable, or whether EA didn't refine enough, it's hard to say, but Skate It is a frustration of decent ideas and controls that aren't precise enough. Given the Wii, and the variety of approaches available, there should be so much room for imaginative application. It took a gamepad and was really smart, mapping everything to the analogue sticks, and connecting you with the board. Skate, the reinvention of the skating game for 360 and PS3, was most notable for its controls. That's how I've spent too much of my time with Skate It. EA is packing a ton of gameplay into this one and Wii owners should be keeping an eye on it.You know that bit in the old black-and-white movie where the guy has the hose and he tries to squirt the other guy in the face, and no water comes out? So he holds the hose to his face to see the problem, and squirt! All over him. But these issues aren't deal breakers and, as we said, Skate It's multiplayer modes are still a lot of fun. We have a feeling, though, that the higher difficulty curve of the balance board controls will see more players opting to skate with just the remote. So during a game with four players and three rounds it's going to calibrate 12 times, adding a lot of downtime to the experience. It has to calibrate for each player, every time you step on. Playing with the balance board presents another issue. We suppose it would be nice to have the option to use just one controller, but the game would move along more smoothly if you didn't have to pass it around. So even though four players can get in on a game, they all have to share one remote. First of all, while the game provides a variety of control options (remote/remote and nunchuk/remote and balance board), it will only recognize one controller at a time. We had a lot of fun with the multiplayer games, but there are a few interface issues that aren't quite as friendly as they might be. Each event has multiple environments to compete in and players can set the number of rounds they want, so there are quite a few options available. Hall of Meat turns everything around to see which player can bail, break the most bones, and rack up the highest medical bill. Time is a turn-based race where skaters try to get the lowest time to the finish line. In Line, a series of grindable objects have been lined up for players to chain tricks along. Trick gives players one object to bust a move on and everyone tries to get the highest score. There are four multiplayer modes to choose from: Best Trick, Best Line, Best Time, and Hall of Meat. Each player can select their own created skater, although we should note that loading each profile took a rather long time. The soundtrack is also excellent, featuring a variety of indie rock, hip-hop, and metal bands. We've said it before, but allow us to reiterate that EA has done a fantastic job with the menus in Skate It. From the main menu, Party Play will get you into the multiplayer zone.
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