28. Skate Rock
Are you ready to rock? (Yeah!)
Are you ready to SKATE ROCK?!? (Possibly?)
Now, I know old Hank might not strike you as the totally tubular type in any respect. However, you shouldn't always judge a book by its cover, and I have a particular fondness for skateboarding games, or at least ones that don't involve that tactless degenerate Bart Simpson. The genre has certainly seen its share of garbage, and it took quite a while for video game developers to deliver a spin on skateboarding anywhere near playable, but the Commodore 8-bit line is not without it's classic skate games - Skate or Die and 720 have certainly earned their fair share of fans over the years.
On a very-related note, inheriting a big stack of floppy disks (or possibly even downloading a large folder's worth of disk images) is another activity for which I have plenty of fondness. Any retro-enthusiast completely cold, loading a program that's truly an unknown quantity beyond a short filename, anxiously awaiting what it has to offer. In this case, I have "SKATROCK.D64" - or, more accurately, Skate Rock, by Richard Clark of Zig Zag Creations.
Skate Rock's developmental and publishing lineage is a little complex. The game seems to have been a commercially successful release for the C64, and I found versions licensed by Sharedata, Bubble Bus Software, and budget software publisher Mastertronic (via their "Ricochet" re-release series). Though the C64 boasts the most technically impressive version of the game, there's also a port to the IBM PC (only suitable for fans of cyan and magenta, of course). There are also variations in the game's title: some versions omit the space between Skate and Rock, while others refer to the game as Arcade SkateRock, Skate Rock Simulator, or even Awesome Earl in Skate Rock (presumably making the player character Awesome Earl).
Skate Rock borrows heavily from the game mechanics and feel of Atari Games' 720, though a side-scrolling version of Paperboy may actually be a more apt comparison. With the exception of tricking off a kicker ramp from time to time, the games focuses very little on tricks, and instead centres around picking up a series of flags as you cruise down the street. Along the way, you'll be confronted with joggers, sewage grates, rabid stray dogs, construction workers, and just about any other urban or suburban obstacle that a young skate rat could possibly envision. The allotted time to complete your journey isn't generous, and there won't be much room to safely proceed at a leisurely pace, or to repeatedly double-back on missed flags.
The game contains ten courses, but I was unable to get past the steep difficulty climb of the game's fourth stage. The levels benefit from variations in color schemes and course layout, particularly the highway level, which abandons the small-town scenery of prior levels for a decrepit, crumbling overpass. The player also has the choice of three difficulty settings, as well as control settings to allow customizable degrees of truck tightness (an essential feature of any skateboarding game, as no one wants to be seen tic-taccing down the street like a complete poser).
The graphics are best described as passable, with good use of the C64's color palette and large, distinct sprites. I did notice quite a bit of glitching at certain points (usually accompanied by slowdown), which I was able to capture on-camera for this review. It didn't happen too often, and didn't tend to affect gameplay or result in lost lives, but it certainly wasn't pretty and took away from the sense of immersion surely intended by the developer.
The music here isn't great. The drum groove playing throughout each level was immediately catchy and complemented the action well, but became repetitive, and I turned down the volume after a few minutes of play.
Though it doesn't exactly look or sound deplorable, Skate Rock is unfortunately failed by its difficult and frustrating controls. The isometrically-suited "tank controls" of 720 are applied as expected: the Up direction accelerates, Down slows you down, while Left and Right rotate you in your preferred direction (along with a sharp but barely-controllable "kickturn" performed by holding the fire button). However, your skater unfortunately doesn't have much of a serviceable turn radius, and you'll find the game much more akin to a side-scrolling slalom run - turn more than 90 degrees in either direction and you're likely to lose a life, if not all of them.
Worse, it was possible to get stuck at the edge of the screen and continuously lose lives, as skating off-screen instantly results in a bail, and there isn't any way to back away from the edge - you need to accelerate in order to turn whatsoever, and the process repeats itself anew. I would've preferred if the game restarted me in some sort of default/neutral position (as it did every once in a while), but more often than not, losing one life meant I was doomed to lose the rest of them shortly thereafter due to this perplexing flaw.
Still, there's some fun to be had throughout this session. It does feel good to accelerate to top speed and find yourself locked in a flow state, ollieing in and out of the sidewalk, flying off kickers, weaving around obstacles, and collecting every flag in your path. Though your main task never differs, the level designs and obstacle types change up frequently, and you'll encounter your share of kooky human and non-human opposition along the way. With that said, I do feel the game could've benefited from a dose of random chance - the aforementioned obstacles always appear at the same points in the levels they inhabit, take the same paths across the screen, and the flag locations are similarly static.
Skate Rock largely received positive reviews upon it's release (usually between 6.0-8.0/10), but doesn't often seem to be brought up in recollections of classic Commodore titles in the present day, and it consequently may not surprise you to learn that I felt a little more lukewarm about my overall experience. A single session is fun, but the initial appeal of bombing down the side-scrolling sidewalk quickly wanes with repetition, and the flaky controls and technical issues land Skate Rock firmly in the "not bad enough to be infamous, but not worth a try otherwise" category. You can basically forget about it once you finish reading this review and you won't be much worse-off for doing so.
Think you can shred with the big boys at the top of our Skate Rock leaderboard? Check out our High Scores page and submit a screenshot to earn your spot in the C128 Hoedown hall of fame!
This site is copyright 2023 Hank Wesley Chorkin. If you don't like it, you can get out!
Back