Get your jerk on

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’s Pro Skater 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.