Skate Park City
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PSP
| Skate Park City

There are a few certain rules in life that you can always rely on - things whose regularity is a comfort in our variable world. Like, for example, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, or that beautiful young women only marry rich pensioners so they can hump their way to a heart attack and all that inheritance. One that should be familiar to most gamers is the following gem: games released straight to a budget price are bad.

It's a good rule to live by. But if you place faith in the idea of omens, start worrying, because hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunami are no longer signs of a forthcoming apocalypse - the real worrying omen is that Skate Park City, a budget game from a no-name developer and minor publisher, is good. Better than good, in fact - it's awesome.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. Skate Park City is, as the name suggests, a game about skating, in a city, in which there are various parks. Motive-wise, there's some introductory twaddle about robots or something, and a weird slightly stereotypical wise man in a not-so-stereotypical flying VW camper van, but it's all immediately forgettable.

If we were to describe the game in terms of maths, we'd say that it's Tony Hawk's Proving Ground minus the realism, or perhaps Jet Set Radio divided by skateboards. The visuals and music both invoke Sega's classic regularly, but never quite reach the same highs: the simple neon graphics lack a certain sophistication without cel-shading, but the environments and draw distances are vast; aurally the high-tempo beats and samples are certainly a diversion from the generic rawk but never quite match the outrageous silliness of JSR.

There are a number of areas in which the game builds upon its contemporaries, however - the most obvious of which is the grappling laser. After about half an hour's play, the laser lets you lock on to nearby 'sticky' objects - usually the roofs of vehicles and gliders that hover in the sky above - and get zapped towards them. Jumping on a glider, for instance, allows you to fly the craft around the level - no restrictions, no invisible walls. One minute you're grinding around a building, the next you're using downwards inertia to fly over it. It controls brilliantly, and the feeling of freedom is totally unmatched.

The game basically boils down to a set of challenges in each area, completion of which unlocks new challenges and grants medals. What's is astonishing about the game, though, is the sheer amount of variety that's on offer throughout these mini-missions. While there's a good number of the type you might expect - do a certain trick here, collect these things, get a certain number of points in an allocated time-frame - the tools mentioned above mean that there's even more possibilities.

One that particularly sticks out involves having to make gliders crash into marked vehicles in order to make them drop items you need. Another involves you using the grappling beam to stay attached to the guru's VW camper van as he drags you around the level, trying to manage the inertia that comes from being tugged around a corner or over a bridge while avoiding the buildings and signposts.

If you're more interested in building up massive scores, there's similarly a lot on offer. Rather than just focus on multipliers for stringing grabs, flips, grinds and manuals together - which you can do as well, of course - the real key to getting stratospheric scores lies in using the environment to your advantage, as well as engaging in combat where possible.

The bonuses for finishing off an enemy mid-combo are suitably impressive given the risk, while doing things like grappling onto on a glider, crashing it into a van and landing in a manual to continue the combo - all of which, yes, can be done as part of a string of tricks - similarly boosts combo value to impressive heights. But, more importantly, there's no substitute for the rush that comes with pulling something like that off.

In terms of content, there's heaps - in addition to all the marked missions, there are special challenges in each area for doing things like pulling a massive score in a single playthrough or managing to stay on a glider for a certain distance. If you really wanted to collect every medal, of which there are nearly 400, it could conceiveably take upwards of 30 hours.

In terms of gameplay, well, it's unrivalled on the PSP - there are very few games with this much originality, and we haven't even touched upon the full-blown multiplayer mode - both local Ad-Hoc and over the internet in Infrastructure mode, and there's game sharing. It doesn't feel like much of an overstatement to say that Skate Park City has pretty much everything you could want from a game.

Now if you'll excuse us, looks like the First Horseman has just rounded the corner - we've got some last minute religious convertin' to do.

Skate Park City

Vast, creative and startlingly fun, Skate Park City proves that it's not big budgets that make a game good
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