The Simpsons Skateboarding
| The Simpsons Skateboarding | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 No, this is not the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater-like game you were expecting. But, at least it's not Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, either.
| ||||||||||||||||
|
The Simpsons Skateboarding is a 2002 skateboarding video game developed by The Code Monkeys, published by Electronic Arts, and distributed by Fox Interactive. It was released for the PlayStation 2 in North America in November 2002, and a month later in Europe. The game received a very negative reception and is considered one of the worst skateboarding games of all time.
Development
The Simpsons Skateboarding was developed by The Code Monkeys and published by Electronic Arts (EA Games) under license from Fox Interactive. Before EA made an official announcement about The Simpsons Skateboarding, an advertisement for the game was featured on the back page of the instruction manual for The Simpsons: Road Rage, and on in-game billboards, which was released in 2001. There was no mention of a console in the advertisement and no gameplay details were revealed. In November 2001, EA representatives said they were not ready to comment on the product. On 16 May 2002, a few days before the E3 Media and Business Summit, they released their first piece of information about the game. All of the characters' voices were recorded by the actual voice actors from The Simpsons.
Gameplay
Springfield has been converted into a skate park for the annual skate tour, full of skateable objects and landmarks from the television series. Players can choose one of the nine characters available to compete for the grand prize. All of the characters' voices were recorded by the actual voice actors from The Simpsons. Each character has over forty unique moves. Players can test their skills in either a two-player head-to-head skate off, or in one of the fast and furious modes: Freeskate, Skate Fest, Trick Contest, and a game of skateboard H-O-R-S-E, unlocking additional characters, locations, and skateboards. Players can also choose to learn all the skateboard moves and tricks before they begin the actual game in the Skillz School mode.
Why It Should Be Sent to a Special Class
- Extremely weak plot. The prize for winning the skateboarding contest is $99 (which would be $175.57 adjusted for inflation), which is a small amount of money. Even the easiest objectives in THPS2 and THPS4 pay more than this which is incredibly embarrassing and lacks inventiveness for the plot and seems to be written rather on the knee.
- Whenever you pick a character, you have to wait for that character to finish talking to show his or her stats, which gives the impression that the menu was not even tested, since the developers could not even do such a simple thing.
- With almost every challenge, you get rewarded with only $0.10 initially, which is practically no payment and possibly is like that just to pad the game length, but that makes it even more tedious than it already is.
- For the first challenge, you get rewarded with $0.99. How are you supposed to buy a Ferrari? Or pay a month's rent? Or even get yourself a cheap lunch from your local corner shop?
- Clumsy controls that don't fully copy what Tony Hawk's Pro Skater does, making the game extremely frustrating to players used to the controls in that series.
- The worst offenders are the left analog stick used for forwarding movement, which just doesn't feel natural, nor even comfortable, and the L1/R1 buttons used for spinning, which don't even work most of the time. Instead of being tight and responsive, the controls just feel slow and sluggish. The physics also doesn't help the least bit.
- They also had a bit of delay or were a bit unresponsive, which that flaw makes it the reason why it is weaker than Tony Hawk, and makes everything worse with the fact that they already are slow and sluggish.
- Poor level design that does not consider combo potential. Going back to Tony Hawk, the levels had set pieces that were subtly integrated into their designs and they felt natural as a result; here though, rails and ramps are randomly plastered throughout the map with very few combo opportunities.
- Only a handful of tricks that you can perform; there's no wall-ride, or reverts here to extend your trick combos in any way, for example.
- The game implements a stat system where, depending on the character you're using, you will have more or less difficulty performing certain tricks. The problem is that the developers were too lazy, or forgot to balance the characters adequately, and this is especially notable with Homer.
- He has a very low jumping stat level; thus, making some tricks like the kick-flip will always result in him falling off to the ground, and what's even worse is that even if you complete every challenge that does not require to perform this trick and upgrade the jumping stat to the max without spending your money in other stats, Homer will still fall from the skateboard every time you perform this trick, because the required jumping level is not enough to perform it adequately. In other words, completing all of the challenges as Homer is entirely impossible.
- Grinding is far too easy, as the balance meter will stay at the dead center, as long as you don't move to the left or right, while you're actually on the rail, which shows more of the laziness of the developers, and the fact that they did not care how the balance of the game works at all.
- The ollie height is very inconsistent, making even simple flat land tricks hard to pull off which can lead to many cheap failures, and you will be frustrated many times before you finally succeed.
- Lengthy load times that almost veer into Sonic '06 levels of long.
- Many unoriginal and idiotic goals, like getting Ralph's golf ball out of the water.
- Many bugs and glitches such as passing through rails. As a result, one can get the impression that the developers did not want to test this game and wanted to release the game as soon as possible.
- There are no diagonal direction tricks. This is because the developers did not want to add such an important thing and decided that no one would be offended by it.
- Kent Brockman never stops talking. For example, he constantly says the name of every trick you do. Some of his other lines are unfunny (ex. "Somebody get a really big band-aid!")
- The main menu theme is just an ear-grating remix of the show's theme song. The rest of the game's music doesn't fare much better, either.
- Very poor graphics for 2002 standards that are comparable to an early Sega Dreamcast game. Even Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure, which were on the Sega Dreamcast, looked better than this game. To an extent, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 came out a year before, and Pro Skater 4 in the same year, and they look miles better.
- It's even more insulting as the game runs on the RenderWare engine, and there are lots of games that look better on that engine, including the PS2 era of Tony Hawk games.
- Not to mention that it looks worse than Road Rage, which while they didn't age well, at least they managed to look decent for the time and it was the first time they made The Simpsons in 3D, here however the characters look terrible for 2002 standards.
- The character models are also awful, and look like a PlayStation 1 or Nintendo 64 game, the worst offender might be Homer, who looks like he is made of plastic, same with the other characters, they are so poorly made that even Road Rage had better characters models than this for the cutscenes, which looked a bit uncanny but not as bad as this game.
- Poor lip-syncing.
- Recycled voice clips from The Simpsons: Road Rage.
- As said in WIS #11, you can fall off when doing tricks off a ramp.
Redeeming Qualities
- The voice acting is good, backed up by the actual Simpsons cast.
- You can turn Kent Brockman's voice off.
- You can upgrade your character's stats from the Pause menu, something that even Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and 4 didn't allow you to do.
Reception
The game received a very negative reception at the time of its release and has an average score of 38 out of 100 on Metacritic. Critics criticized outdated graphics, hopeless audio, lack of any tricks, poorly programmed controls, and strange errors accompanying the recorded dialogues. IGN gave the game a 2.5/10 and Gamespot gave the game a 3.9/10, none of the critics gave the game higher than 5/10.
Due to such bad reviews, many people have considered it one of the worst, if not the worst, skateboarding games one of the worst PlayStation 2 games, and even one of the worst games of all time.
WatchMojo ranked this game the 2nd WORST in the Top 10 BEST & WORST Simpsons games.
Videos
Trivia
Comments
- Bad media
- Bad games
- PlayStation 2 games
- Television-based games
- Games reviewed By Caddicarus
- Sports games
- Electronic Arts
- Games played by SuperMega
- The Simpsons games
- 2000s games
- Games made in the United Kingdom
- Shovelware games
- The Code Monkeys games
- Games reviewed by Square Eyed Jak
- Candidates for the worst game of all time
- RenderWare
- Hard games
- Featured on TV Tropes' So Bad, It's Horrible