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Skate It (Wii)4 starsEA$49.99

Don’t be fooled–the “it” in EA’s Skate It doesn’t actually refer to skating. Sure, you can tear up the streets of San Vanelona, the now-ruined city from last year’s Skate for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but really it’s the idea of jerking the motion-sensitive controller that shows the game would have been more comfortable with a name like Jerk It, if not for the, uh, other connotation it might suggest.

Particularly on Nintendo’s family-friendly console.

Basically, Skate It takes the idea from last year’s game and capitalizes on it with Nintendo’s “Wiimote,” and for better effect, since the Wii was built from the ground up with motion-sensitive waggling in mind.

For the most part, the system works well, with a combination of Wiimote- and nunchuk-mapped functions. Ollies and nollies (ollies with the nose of your board pointed down) are performed by jerking the Wiimote up or down, respectively, while grabs are handled with the Wiimote’s Z button, and manuals are done simply with a combination of pointing the controller up or down in conjunction with the nunchuk’s buttons.

Controlling your board is done with the nunchuk’s thumbstick and tapping A to move forward. The game is actually pretty complex in how technical pulling off tricks can be, something that’s supposedly addressed when using the game with Nintendo’s Wii Fit balance board, which I was unfortunately unable to test for this review.

Although the controls seems a little unwieldy (it took me over an hour to grasp that ollies were not done by pressing a button) the learning curve isn’t too bad, and once you do finally get the hang of the controls, they make sense. Like any game in the genre since Tony Hawk 4 introduced gamers to the concept of free skating, Skate It drops you in the middle of an open-world environment and tells you to do one thing: skate to your heart’s content.

From that standpoint, Skate It seems like any other skateboarding game, but since the original controls are well done, any skating you choose to do feels pretty natural (again, once you get past that learning curve).

The gameplay comes through various challenges (trick this, do that combination, get X number of points) and is surprisingly solid, although timed tasks can be annoying.

The presentation is nice, too, for the most part, although the all-over-the-map soundtrack ranges from great to grating, the graphics make the game look like a PS2 title and I found it hard to build momentum sometimes. Still, for not having played a skateboarding game since Tony Hawk 4, Skate It is one of the few that gets motion controls right, and it’s surprisingly fun.

Need for Speed: Undercover2.5 starsEAPS3, Xbox 360$59.99 In the early days of open-ended driving games, the PS1’s Driver was a pretty big deal. Not only could you evade cops in a real city like Chicago or San Francisco, but you could just drive around and see the sights if you wanted to.

Well, evidently the folks at EA’s Black Box studios never heard of Grand Theft Auto, much less any other open-world game, since the fictional Tri-bay city in Need For Speed: Undercover is about as bereft of things to do as Driver was, only they don’t have the excuse of the comparatively piddling 32-bit processing power of Sony’s old system.

This is emblematic of most the problems present in the game. Although there are a lot of cool ideas working here, Need for Speed: Undercover constantly undermines itself. Take the game’s inclusion of a GPS unit, for instance. Although the city is open, meaning you can drive to the game’s destination, you can alternately pull up the GPS and click on a destination. Boom, you’re there.

After the relative thrill of running from the cops wears off (which takes about 10 minutes, since most of the time they’re not very smart) there’s pretty much no reason to drive anywhere. The map is too big, and since there aren’t other things to do, it’s a lot of wasted space–not to mention potential.

Equally as frustrating are the game’s cinematic moments, like barreling through a huge pipe onto a street below, or busting through a fence and jumping your car over another road, clearing a gap. Again, these feel like wasted scenarios because they’re so few and far between, and even when they do appear they aren’t too exciting.

It’s clear that Need for Speed: Undercover desperately wants to be a game in the Burnout series, whose dizzying sense of speed and climactic collisions stand out as pinnacles of the racing genre, but it just doesn’t quite go the distance. Add to all this a ludicrously acted story that’s a verbatim rip-off of The Fast and the Furious (with live-action FMV cut scenes, making the game feel like it came out in 1994) and you get the idea.

The game ain’t all bad though. To Black Box’s credit, the driving part of the game is well put-together, with any of the game’s various new sports cars and old-school roadsters driving as silky smooth or as unwieldy as you customize them to be.

But really, given the open world and the way the game’s design undermines itself at every turn (not to mention the graphics, which have a pretty bad case of “this-game-looks-better-in-screenshots”) there are better racers on the market than this one. Unless you’re a huge NFS fan or really, really, need a speed fix, go with Burnout Paradise instead. It’s almost a year old already, but it runs rings around this one.