Journalistic game review of Street Sk8er 2, for the PlayStation.
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The late 90s and early 2000s was a time when every game developer was looking to cash in on the skateboarding trend, but nobody was really sure how to do it yet. The Tony Hawk games went with a more collectathon, almost platforming, style. Thrasher Skate and Destroy was more of a sim, but today we're going to take a look at Street Sk8er 2, for the PlayStation.

Street Sk8er 2 was released in spring 2000, which puts it about 6 months after THPS1 and 6 months before THPS2. It's a follow up to the really mediocre Street Sk8er, taking a few cues from THPS and coming back with a much more solid entry that still has its own unique flavor.

The gameplay of Street Sk8er 2 is... kind of hard to explain. It's a race, but there aren't any other competitors. It's all about getting a high score, but at the same time, you have to cross checkpoints and get across the finish line before time is up. If you don't make it, you fail, no matter how high your score is. That's really all there is to it.

This immediately puts it at a more simplistic level than the other games. That doesn't mean that it's bad though, especially if it plays well.

Calling it 'street skater' isn't really true. The game is HEAVILY focused on grabs and air tricks like backflips and McTwists. The square, triangle, and circle buttons all do tricks like that. The only real strategy to getting a high score is to find the biggest halfpipe you can and start doing spinning grab tricks until you have JUST enough time left to get across the finish line. But check this out. It counts your rotations wrong on transition. 360s count as 540s, 720s count as 900s. I THINK this has something to do with the way the game doesn't count a frontside or backside air as a rotation, but it doesn't make sense.

There's no nollie or fakie stance, no manuals, and only 6 flip tricks total throughout the game. There are a few different grinds too, but they're really awkward to pull off, and you barely get any points for them. You want to do a crooked grind? You have to hit X, triange, and L2 right as you land on a rail. How can you even do that on a PlayStation controller? It's tough too, because triangle is usually a grab button. I can't tell you how many times I did a grab right as I was about to land on a rail and I ripped my face off on the pavement.

Because there are so many grabs in the game, and every character has a unique set, there are a lot of weird tricks that they needed to invent to pad out the trick list. One character has a bunch of no-footed grab tricks including this one: Christ Aerobics? What? You'll find yourself doing midair handstands and double backflips and all kinds of weird stuff. These tricks are landmines. They take forever to do, and you have no chance of completing them unless you did it full speed off of a quarterpipe. I bailed by accidentally doing one of these tricks countless times.

Here's how the career mode works. You race through the level, trying to beat the high score. When you do, you're taken to a bonus level where your score is turned into extra time for the next level. Rinse and repeat. 5 levels later and you're all done! It shows you this screen, telling you to try again on the next difficulty mode. Beat that, and it sends you to hard mode. The only difference is that your stats get higher as you play, and the score goal goes way up. If you get really good, you can probably run through career mode in about 10 minutes. I was really surprised the first time I finished it.

Once you finish hard mode, you start unlocking things. Getting new boards and characters is nice. The decks are all real graphics, but the characters are imaginary, so it isn't much incentive to keep playing.

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