Street Sk8er

Let us start this review by saying that we'd much rather actually go skateboarding with a real skateboard and real streets than play the PS1 game Street Sk8er, which is now available on the PSP, ever again.

That might not sound like the most damning comment in the world, especially to those baggy trousered types with the ability to stick up two fingers to Sir Isaac Newton while merrily performing improbable tricks. But for us, attemptiing to skateboard is disastrous, humiliating and painful.

And playing Street Sk8er is worse. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's all sorts of awful to catalogue before we even start ripping into the gameplay.

The game is a straight-up skating affair where you fill the cliched shoes of one of four hackneyed characters to rack up as many points as possible by performing tricks on a variety of street courses against a time limit.

Things get off to a bad start as there's no explanation anywhere in the game about how to perform tricks besides a well-hidden and perfunctory screen accessible from the main menu, which helpfully tells you which buttons let you jump, brake and crouch.

So upon loading the first level you spend the first ten minutes crashing into everything, as the realisation slowly dawns on you that these courses are end-to-end affairs with specific sections earmarked for gathering points with long boring pieces of connecting track that merely have to be traversed in between. In the absence of plentiful opportunities to perform tricks or instructions on how to perform them, progress is difficult.

After a protracted session of trial and error, made all the more excruciating by the commentator's insipid calls of 'let's jam' and the fact that each course features just one looped track of pop punk evil, it becomes clear that the only place to earn serious points is on the half pipes.

This isn't done by using button combinations, but rather via a list of random screen prompts (which are less then clear), usually consisting of a D-pad direction and jump button combination, which is fun for about thirty seconds if you're the sort of person who gets a kick out of changing the TV channel whist adjusting the volume at the same time.

It makes earning points a time consuming and punitively strenuous affair; indeed, the difficulty bar is completely unforgiving and though there is the incentive of new characters and courses to unlock, the requisite will and skill combination probably doesn't exist in human form.

You can level up your character's various attributes with points earned during play, but they don't appear to make a significant difference, and almost all of the skaters handle like camels.

Presentation-wise, Street Sk8er is a patronising exercise in what the developers presumably assumed constituted skating culture at the time of release. The result is a hodgepodge of garish graffiti, outrageously baggy clothes, music to hate your parents to, and the cringe-worthy shoehorning of 'street' terminology that jars like an embarrassing middle-aged uncle bopping to MC Hammer.

Visually the game is a stinker too, with characters that look like they were made using origami, uninspiring course designs and textures that resemble television static - poor even for a PS1 game.

The addition of the VS and Free Skate modes would have helped had the game's core mechanics not been so fundamentally broken, but ultimately Street Sk8er leaves us with nothing to recommend. Avoid.