Skate It (Wii) Preview
Posted by Ramon Aranda on 05.16.2008
Hands-on: We get a glimpse and some actual playtime with EA's Skate It.
I recently attended EA's Spring Event in San Francisco and not only saw the first glimpse of Skate It for the Nintendo Wii. The game is a spin-off from Skate which released for the Xbox 360 and PS3. The action takes place once again in San Vanelona but the city has been stricken with some sort of incident that has left it broken down and deserted. Of course this makes for a perfect landscape to get your skating on so the stage is set to bust our your skateboards. There were two control schemes that were shown off. Firstly, the game can be controlled with the Wii remote only. The way it works is that the remote becomes your skateboard. If you tilt the Wii remote to the left, it tilts your skateboard, same as if you tilt to the right, backwards or forward. The ‘A' button will be used to pick up your speed while the ‘B' button causes you to grab your board. You will also perform tricks using gesture based movements - we've included a video below that shows just how you'll gesture to perform tricks.
"This is how we do it!"
Where the game really got me interested however was in the revelation that Skate It will support the Wii Balance Board. The game is still early in development and we were also warned that the developers had only just recently gotten a hold of the balance board so they hadn't really gotten much of a chance to fool around with it but what they have so far looks and feels pretty good. The Wii remote will still be needed for gesture based tricks as well as for picking up speed and grabbing the board, but so far the balance board will allow you to tilt yourself to the left or right, forward or backward to give you a sense of being on a real skateboard. It all felt pretty realistic and I was excited about what the board could add to the game. It's unknown if Black Box and EA Montreal will try to incorporate other functionality to the board but as we mentioned before, they've only had but a few weeks with it so we'll have to wait and see what else can be done with it.
Graphically the game looks pretty decent, but don't expect any visuals that compare with Skate for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Again, the game is pretty early in development so we can assume that the game will get a graphical upgrade in the coming months. Luckily we did not see any problems with the frame rate as it ran at a smooth 30 fps. All in all the game shows promise even this early on and we can only hope that EA puts a heavy effort on this possible groundbreaking title.
