E3 2010: Shaun White Skateboarding Preview
Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater cornered the market on over-the-top action and EA's Skate nailed realism, so when creating Shaun White Skateboarding, Ubisoft knew it had to do something different. They've certainly done that. Shaun White Skateboarding is essentially a giant park creator, except you build the park as you're skating.
There's no complicated level editor, no clunky controls to frustrate you. Instead, you press a single button while skating to shape rails, quarter pipes, banks, and more. Let's say you're nearing the end of a rail, but you want to keep grinding. Hit the shape button and you create a continuation of the rail as you skate. This green rail can go any which way you want. Curve left, pull up, drop back down and jump off. That green rail then sets itself in the environment so you (or your friends online) can ride it. You're still governed by physics, so you'll slow as you incline and gain some speed if you create a decline.
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Don't like the height of a quarter pipe or a rail? Ride on them, hit the Shape button and redesign them on the fly. There's no set limit of rails you can create in an area, but each piece of skating terrain you create has a length limit (which is fairly significant). You can merge rails by running one into the other. The one downside that I saw watching the demo is that only specific parts of the map can be manipulated, so you can't just grind along a fountain and shape a rail from that. If this stays true for the full game, you won't have complete creative control over your environment.
That said, the shaping feature is a real surprise. The benefits of the system are immediately apparent. When you enter a sandbox area, you can look around, see a ledge you couldn't possibly reach and then work your route to it. How this will figure into the story mode, which isn't being shown yet, will be interesting. With some creative level design and challenges, the shaping feature could add a unique exploration and even puzzle element to Shaun White Skateboarding.
Though Ubisoft is not showing story mode yet, they are talking about it. You play as yourself (only prettier), a skater who suffers under the rule of The Ministry. These old fuddy-duds don't like fun, risk, or danger. Fortunately, Shaun White has started The Rising, a resistance group made up of skaters determined to free the city from The Ministry's grip and show people that fun can be a good thing. Basically, it's Footloose on a skateboard.
There are five large districts within the fictional city, with each area serving as its own sandbox for your creativity. At the start, you won't have any cool shaping abilities. Those will be earned as you free the various districts. But you will have reason to return to areas you've previously liberated. With new shaping skills, you'll be able to reach new parts of the district and create a more interesting skate park.
A set of 100 challenges add to the story quests. These are a mix of shaping and skating tasks that have Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels. Completing challenges earn experience points, which can be used to unlock new tricks. Also, completing challenges is fun. The gods of game design say it to be true.
One thing that may cause some controversy among skating fans is the controls, which are streamlined from what the competitors offer. Like Skate, Shaun White offers trick control on the right analog stick. But instead of half-circles and precision moves, Shaun White Skateboarding has you flick up, left, right or down for tricks. It's as simple as that.
As you chain moves, you increase your combo meter and unlock bigger moves for each direction. This takes away some control from the player, but you can tweak tricks, so there are some modifiers to change things up.
This simpler control scheme means that less of your focus is on learning precision control on a device that doesn't offer that level of exactness. How many times in Skate did you think you were going to do one move, but instead did something else because you didn't perfectly nail the movement on the stick?
![[IMG]](http://ps3media.ign.com/ps3/image/article/109/1092180/shaun-white-skateboarding-20100524014730295-000.jpg)
For a different type of game, the simplified controls might be an issue, but considering what Shaun White Skateboarding is attempting to do, I don't think this will be a problem. The focus isn't on what trick you're doing, but on how you build out your own little skate world.
One nice thing is that manuals are tied to a button press. You still need to manage balance (same with grinds), but it should be a lot easier to land into a manual in Shaun White than it is in Skate. And that alone should help you string together some cool tricks.
Shaun White Skateboarding is set for a fall release on PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. The Wii version follows the same principles, but is a different game, which we won't see until E3 this June.
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