The Simpsons Skateboarding

The Simpsons Skateboarding
No, this is not Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. But, at least it's not Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, either.
Genre(s): Sports Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Release: NA: November 12, 2002 EU: December 6, 2002 Engine: RenderWare Developer(s): The Code Monkeys Publisher(s): Electronic Arts Country: United Kingdom Series: The Simpsons

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.

Gameplay

Springfield has been converted into a skate park for the annual skate tour, full of skate-able objects and landmarks from the television series. Players are able to 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

1. Extremely weak plot. The prize for winning the skateboarding contest is $99, 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.
2. 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.
3. With almost every challenge, you get rewarded with only $0.10 initially, which is practically no payment.
   • 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?
4. Clumsy controls which 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 don't help the least bit.
5. Poor level design that does not take combo potential into consideration. 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.
6. 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.
7. The game implements a stat system where, depending on the character you're using, you will have more or less difficulties to perform 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 on 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Lengthy load times that almost veer into Sonic '06 levels of long.
11. Many unoriginal and idiotic goals, like getting Ralph's golf ball out of the water.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. 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!")
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. Poor lip-syncing.
18. Recycled voice clips from The Simpsons: Road Rage.
19. As said in WIS #11, you can fall off when doing tricks off a ramp.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The voice acting is good, backed up by the actual Simpsons cast.
2. You can turn Kent Brockman's voice off.
3. 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, in fact 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 game and one of the worst PlayStation 2 games and even one of the worst games of all time.

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