Skateboard Madness: Xtreme Edition
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| Skateboard Madness: Xtreme Edition | ||||||||
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 At least the title's accurate.
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Skateboard Madness: Xtreme Edition is a 2007 skateboarding video game published by Phoenix Games for the PlayStation 2.
Why It's Madness
- It is essentially a ripoff of the Tony Hawk’s series.
- Confusing title, as it would make you think you got a limited edition version and not the normal version, but no, this is the actual title for it. So it feels like Phoenix Games didn't think about the game's title very well.
- Terrible graphics that look as revolutionary as an early 3D PlayStation game more than a late PS2 game, with most of the models looking very polygonal, and the textures are very poorly rendered, resembling a screenshot from a flip phone from the 2000s.
- Every character on the selection screen has the same model as each other, as if Phoenix was too lazy to give each character a different type of design. The only noticeable differences are different clothes, hairstyles, and color skin.
- Awful controls. First off, the Ollie has to be perfected by crouching for a long time to get better height. If you just push the button, you barely get an inch off of the ground, and while that is normal for other skateboarding games, it isn’t here, as if you hit something while you're crouching, you exit out of the crouching immediately, which gets annoying pretty fast.
- Another problem is that the controls can sometimes be inconsistent, such as if you tap the grab button, you hold onto your board, but sometimes you grab your board for some reason, and sometimes, if you go up a ramp when you don't hold any buttons, the character would spin himself around and around like a record player. This spinning results in uncontrollable bailing, and this is furthered that when sometimes when you bail, the controls freeze for 3 seconds preventing you from moving immediately after.
- You can only score points if you go up a ramp and then perform tricks. This makes no sense, as if you were to perform the tricks on ground, you should score points just like any other skateboarding game, but Phoenix Games couldn't understand that and decided to go a more convoluted way.
- The scoring system itself is inconsistently programmed, as sometimes the tricks fail to show up even when you go up a ramp, meaning you won't get any points at all, unless you go up another ramp, where it would count, along with the other tricks you did, making it poorly programmed to say the least. This is why according to Tactical Bacon's footage on his Tony Hawk's Pro Skater Knockoffs Collection, the game registered tricks he didn't do on screen and didn't register the tricks he did immediately.
- Poor sound effects, such as the grinding sound effect, which sounds like a jammed rapid-fire Nerf gun more than a grinding sound effect, and the sound effect for when you hit a checkpoint, which sounds like a sound effect from a terrible Nintendo Entertainment System fan game.
- Bland soundtrack which sounds mostly forgettable for the most time. Instead of having a track that other skateboarding games have like something to do with hip hop and rap genres, this one goes for techno music which sounds like MIDI music made in only 2 hours.
- Some levels depending on the modes are sometimes brutal to complete, such as Level 4 in the Collector mode, where you have to be frame-perfect to even complete it, meaning if you screw up one time, you're done for, because of the terrible controls, and that you are on a 1 minute timer, which is too short for a level like this, despite it being so small. And level 2 in Checkpoint Race, but for the wrong reasons, where clearing the stairs in these are a challenge since you can't grind on the stairs for some reason, so you have to be precise when going up the stairs, which sounds harder than it is.
- Some glitches are present in this game, such as the characters sometimes clipping through a ramp and getting stuck outside the map, basically soft-locking the game unless you restart, and if you hit something and bail when you start, the camera decides to flip upside down or no reason whatsoever.
- Speaking of glitches, on some emulators, the game can sometimes display a DOS-like error message that basically states a texture error, which is a clear indication that Phoenix didn't check for some bugs in either the textures or models.
- The High Score mode is extremely easy and requires no challenge whatsoever, mainly due to the time limit, which is 10 minutes, meaning that you can effortlessly go back and forth on ramps performing the same tricks that give you high scores over and over again until the timer runs out, which makes this mode very short in comparison to other modes.
- Additionally, even if you do meet the goal before the time runs out, you still have to wait for the timer to run out before it actually counts.
- The text at the end of each level is poorly-implemented, since all it says is "New Level Unlocked New Highscore !!! Level completed", but it has been chroma-keyed for some reason, and then after the text appears for around a nanosecond, it just cuts to black, literally giving you no time to actually read the text unless you have an extremely fast brain capacity.
Redeeming Qualities
- There are mostly no glitches in this game, as mentioned above in WI'sM#11.
- The soundtrack can still be admittedly catchy, even with it being forgettable.
Videos
Trivia
- The first level in the game is based on a real life location, which is Cathedral Square in Vilnius, Lithuania. According to a comment on Rad Rat's video of the game, because of the famous location being in the game, the game was hyped up by Lithuanian gamers just for the location being featured, and when the game came out, everyone was buying the game left and right.
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