This time on Rad Rat Video, we save lives, and we fight the army with our
skateboards in Evolution Skateboarding.
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today ,we're learning about Evolution Skateboarding. This is a game that came
out on the PS2 and the Gamecube in October 2002. It's about three weeks
before Tony Hawk 4 came out. And when this one came out, a lot of people just
said it was just cheap ripoff of the Tony Hawk games. I think it deserves a
little bit more credit than that. It has some of its own ideas and stuff, but that
doesn't necessarily mean that it was good. So you may have never seen this
game before, but you've probably heard of it because there was a demo for it in
Metal Gear Solid 2. And I did a gameplay video of that right here, you can check
it out. You're Solid Snake, skating around on the oil rig. It's actually
based on this game. So this game, it may seem like a standalone game it's, you
know, there's no 2 at the end, but it is actually the sequel to X Games
skateboarding that came out 2001. This game was not very good. I reviewed it
right here, it's a pretty old video though, so be warned. So we'll see if they
actually did anything better and made it any more interesting. They did kind of
loosen up. This one, the X Games one, is a bit more realistic because you're
actually competing in the X Games. This one, you're fighting boss battles and
you're rescuing children and you're doing all kinds of stuff. So let's take a
look at it and see if it's actually worth playing. So let's just talk about
how this game feels for a minute. The controls are basically the same as Tony
Hawk, except that you actually just hit square to do a kickflip without a
direction. You spin with R2 and L2. There are some double tap moves.
You just usually don't have enough time to try them. And that's actually the
biggest problem with this game. Everything is just so slow trying to do
anything more advanced than a kickflip or a shove it will pretty much guarantee
that you bail. But to be fair, they did do some innovation here, by adding in stuff
like McTwists, rodeo flips backflips without
using special. And even the way that the specials work is different too. When you
fill up your special bar, you actually stack another special trick into your
reserve, and they add up. It's a little different, and it works well for vert, but
not really in the arcade mode. So the controls are a bit slow, and so is the
turning. So you can't just stop and kickturn really quickly, and that gets really
frustrating. The gameplay is pretty much like Tony
Hawk - meaning you've got manuals, but not reverts, so you can't land vert
tricks into a manual, so that just ends your combo. But you're not going to be
doing Tony Hawk - level combos anyway. This game is just too clunky. You manual
by hitting up or down with triangle, like you're doing a grind on the ground, but
if you let go of triangle, you'll end your manual. So you have to actually
ollie by hitting X while still holding down triangle. The timing is really
really tough, and most of the time you'll lose your combo. Also, you can do wallrides
in this game, but you're not using it to connect to new areas. It's just a
lot more simple. Keeping your speed is also really annoying. Almost impossible
at times. So right here in the game, I'm trying to impress this photographer with
a big combo. Usually, you can do a trick on vert, and then you can land on the
coping and grind. And that's a really good way to get started, but if you push
up to the quarter pipe you probably won't even have enough air to do a tre
flip, and even if you do a few setup airs, there's really no way to be sure that
you'll actually get any air. It's a tough thing to see in the video I'm sure. It
just feels really sluggish. And sometimes you have a ton of speed and there really
isn't a clear reason how. And it also doesn't help that the button timing is
really precise and really crappy. So you'll roll up to something, you'll hit
Ollie, and just not go anywhere. It happens all the time, and I never got
used to it even though I played the game all the way through. The way that your
stats work is also pretty weird. So your skater himself doesn't actually have any
stats that improve as you play or anything. But you can modify your board.
I don't mind how they did this actually. It's kind of cool because it's
reversible. You can make a tweak to your board to help you with a certain
challenge, and then tweak it back later if you need to. So you can change the
size of your deck, and that helps in certain ways. You can make your bearings really
slow, which is kind of weird. You can change your wheel size. You can change
your truck tightness. It's a pretty decent system for modifying your stats,
but the way your stats themselves work isn't very good. Let's look at the grinds.
When you first land in a grind, your balance is locked right in the middle,
and usually that's good enough to finish grinding this obstacle or finish the
challenge or whatever it may be. Your balance stat doesn't actually kick in
unless you've been grinding for a while, and when it does, you basically just
instantly lose your balance depending on how good your stat is I guess. But the
thing is, even if you lose balance and fall off the rail, you might still roll
away. So if the rail is relatively short, you'll fall off and just instantly hit
the ground. If you fall for more of a distance, you'll get more and more off
balance in the air, and then you'll fall onto the ground. And as far as the other
stats, I honestly have trouble telling whether they're high or low. I just kind
of set them up in a way that looked good. But also on this page, you can customize
the look of your deck tape. Wow, I've never had brown deck tape before! Come
on! The translation is the worst. You can actually put stickers on your board, and
I think they did a good job with all this customization stuff. And the
graphics are pretty good. So I'll give it credit there. Aside from your board, you
can also customize your combos. This is basically like the create-a-trick
feature in Tony Hawk's Underground. So you pick a few tricks that your
character will do, and it's scored by how long it takes. You have two of them,
they're mapped to R1 and up and R1 and down. In general, the sound design in
this game is pretty good. So the grinds sound good, the environment sounds good.
But the only thing you're ever going to notice is the announcer. This guy is
narrating everything you do. The whole time you play. And I'm sure this is a
huge negative to most people who play it, but I really don't mind it. The game is
generally pretty boring, but he helps keep it moving.
He's just so enthusiastic the whole time.
Tailslide! Frontside shove it! Yeah!!
Body Varial! Smooth!
Take it up to the sky!
Oh, I just don't understand this guy! He is just creative!
He's just totally unconscious!!
But, of course, we have to talk about the horrible trick names. Just
listen: Tail Manual! 5-zero grind! Disaster slide! Pop heel! Grab Tacknee! Primo stool!
Okay, so these names have haunted me for years, since I first played this back
when it was relatively new. And later when I realized that this was actually a
sequel to the X Games, I was even more confused. This came out, a year passed, and
nobody made them redo all that stuff. Just doesn't make any sense.
So here's the thing: this game was developed by Konami in Osaka, Japan, and
my theory is that, maybe the trick names and the "deck tape", and all that stuff
were actually right in Japan, and that they just translated those terms
directly instead of finding the English equivalent to them. I don't know if
that's really the case. The only thing I could think of that actually makes a
little bit of sense. But the thing is, this game has a ton of pros in it. It's got
Danny Way, Mark Appleyard, Rick McCrank, Chris Seen, Stevie Williams, Kerry Getz,
Colin McKay. They could've asked any of these people to take a look at the game
before it came out, and make sure that none of that was wrong. So it's really
weird that they did that, but, I don't know, that might be a reason. But that's
just the trick names. Even if they were right, there would still be problems with
the way they're animated. In general, the animation is pretty good. The grinds all
look and feel really solid, for an example. Stuff is tweaked out right. I
just like the general style of the animation. But the flips are almost
always wrong in some way. Even the 360 flip. On paper, it's right. It does a 360,
and it flips. But it's really flat. It doesn't look natural. Looks kind of
awkward. And then, of course, there the "Popheel" and the hardflip. So this is the
Popheel. It looks kind of like a vertical inward heel flip, I guess, but a
little over flipped. It's a really weird one. And then the hardflip. If you look
close, it actually looks like a shove it underflip. So I have a question for you:
Is it possible that they completely stumbled onto a shove it under flip
because they animated the hard flip based on pictures, and never actually saw one?
Or, did they purposefully animate a shove it under flip, then realize that was
really obscure of a trick, and then rename it to a hardflip? I just have no
idea how this game turned out the way that it did. So the game looks and feels
pretty good, but it could definitely use a little more polish. Let's get into
the different game modes now. First is the arcade mode, which is just the
regular career. And this is exactly like Tony Hawk 1, 2 or 3. There's a
list of things to do, and then you go do them. Sometimes it's really easy, like
getting a certain amount of grind distance. You also have to collect
things, like toolboxes and other things left around the level. And there's also a
unique or a mystery challenge. Freeing prisoners or freeing children. There's
even a weird Castlevania style level where we're saving people from a torture chamber
or something. I don't really know what's going on here. You might think that
there's some overarching story that wraps all this stuff together, but
there isn't. It's just a series of completely random things that happen for no reason.
There are also checkpoint challenges where you have to collect these things
in order to get through the level. And that brings us to the boss battles.
Like I said, there's no story mode. There's nothing connecting all these
things that happen. It's just random stuff that happens for no reason. So you
fight all these bosses, like this semi-truck that's on the loose. So how
does a skateboarder fight against a semi? Do you throw your board through the
windshield to try to hit the driver? Do you move obstacles out in the way so
crashes in it? No, you have to grind on these conveniently-placed grind rails
that are attached to the truck. You grind them all off, the health bar goes down, and
then it crashes. Probably had nothing to do with what you did. So that's how you
beat it. And the other boss, there are only two, is this tank. It's attacking the
city, because that's what tanks do. This time, you're grinding the treads of the
tank, and also the main gun. It poops out grenades at you sometimes. It fires
missiles at you, if you get far away. Of course, they don't hurt you at all.
You don't have a health meter, but it slows you down enough that you might
have to worry about not making it in the time limit. Once you blow up all the
parts of the tank, it's over. You saved... something. Or, you defeated the evil...
something or other. Who knows. Maybe you were stopping Eric Sparrow! I bet that's
what happened. And then this is the end of the game. When you win it just kicks
you out to the main menu. I know that some different things happen if you play
the game as different skaters: like on the back of the box. it shows this giant
crab boss fight, and I never had that happen. But the thing is, this game is
just too hard. The control is really awkward. It's tough to do what you want to
do, so score challenges, photography events, all that stuff is really hard, and it's
hard in a really annoying, frustrating kind of way, not in a fun, challenging way.
So instead of replaying the game a million times, I just decided to check
out the other modes. This is the trial mode. In X Games skateboarding, this is
the X Games competition, but in this one, it's just an unbranded contest. The vert
part looks just like the chopper drop in Pro Skater 2. Which is just really
lazy. And the thing is, this event is actually really really hard.
I had just beaten the game, I'm still fresh on all the controls and everything, and I
was getting 7th place. The vert just feels weird ,and the timing of your ollie
is just way off. Just like in the regular mode ,but there's a lot higher
consequences here. So you hit the Ollie button, you do your special trick, and
then realize you have no air and you just instantly fail. I could probably
keep replaying it over and over and eventually get a medal, but there's just no point.
The park mode is kind of cool, because it's a completely unique level. They
didn't just reuse something from the main game, which is what I was expecting them
to do. I had a decent time with this event, and even managed to get third
after a few tries. But it didn't give me anything. Lastly is the challenge mode. So
there is a tutorial, but this is basically just a more advanced tutorial
where it challenges you to do tricks. I did the first few, and then I got to
this one. So you have to score 50,000 points, and in this game that's a lot. And
your only real bet to get this right is to get up to this half pipe here, and you
have to transfer over this gap, but bail it on purpose. And then you have to grind
over these rail,s and then get up there and go into the halfpipe. But eventually
you'll probably air out of it too far, and you got to redo the whole thing. It's
just a chore and I didn't feel like doing it, so I didn't bother.
So that's Evolution Skateboarding. I don't think it's terrible when it first
came out. It got fours, like I think IGN gave it a 4. I don't think I would have
gone that far with it, but it's definitely not great. You know, a lot of
times with these standalone games, I always wonder about what would happen if
there was a sequel, and they ironed out all the problems with it. But the fact is,
this IS a sequel, and they didn't bother to change any of the things that were
wrong with the first one. So it just comes across as lazy to me. The only
reason I would say you should buy this one is if you're like me and you're
trying to fill a shelf with every skateboarding game ever made. In that
case, you're going to have to pick up a copy. Luckily it's only about 2 bucks. But
I can think of some better ways to use $2 in skateboarding. You could buy True
Skate. You could get a roll of Dimes and make the world's shortest grind rail. You
could buy a candle to wax a curb. You could flush it down the toilet, I don't
know. Anything you want to do with 2 bucks is probably better than this. If
you were really intrigued by this when it came out, and just never got a chance
to try it, you know, go ahead and pick it up. But it's not going to be the best
thing you've ever played by any means. So that's it for Evolution Skateboarding.
Here are some more videos I did recently. I do a lot of these game reviews, but I do
a whole lot of other things in the skateboarding world, so you can check out
different videos. And also make sure you subscribe, so you
can learn something new about skateboarding three times a week. Thanks
for watching.
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