Format: Advance
Genre: Sports
Developer: Full Fat Productions
Publisher: Acclaim

Full Fat Productions. Yeah that's right, the same guys that made Dave Mirra's BMX 3. I don't know how many games they made on the GBA that were copy-clones but this one wasn't nearly as good as BMX 3. The concept in this one is that you're on SKATES instead of a bike or a skateboard. The faces in this one are weeiiirrdd, but the playstyle is the atypical tony hawk style. Strangely enough, this game is "easier" and also harder than other full fat titles. It's an arcade styled mission game where you have about 3-4 tries per level to complete the objectives. Each level has 3 objectives and a top-score objective. Some levels also require you to get to an 'end zone' before the timer reaches zero. The game itself plays like every other tony hawk game, A to jump, B to grind, R to switch-up, L to... umm... do something? The typical button combinations to do tricks returns. This game doesn't seem to have a trick-book option though to look at your tricks so you end up spamming buttons. The top-score isn't all that hard and the grinding in this game seems far far far more forgiving than other full fat games. That fact alone makes this way easier to get top-scores without much effort. The real trouble of this game is the mission objectives. Three of them to be specific. Most objectives are doable with some effort like "ignite the rings" or "smash the boxes", or "collect the tokens". Three of them however, specifically, are bad because of the methods that are required to get them. In the level "escalator" you have to do a completely unique grab and swing up to a higher level to grab the 2nd token in the level. Something you wouldn't think of ever doing. It requires you to hold the B button too, which was hard to figure out since everything else is a button press, practically a dev door. There are two more really bad objectives that are required as well near the end of the game in the levels "Fun Fair" and "Big Circus". Fun Fair has a seemingly easy jump at the start to get up to the higher level, but it's deviously nasty. Half the time you will overshoot the jump, the rest of the time it will kill your momentum. To drag it out further, you need to continue from that jump onto a rail system over to a few circus tents to collect some tokens. This doesn't sound bad, but at each jump there's a chance that your momentum will be killed which means trying it all over again. The final bad mission is in Big Circus with an "ignite the rings" challenge. This one is bad because you have to do a running grind off a low bar, jump to a higher bar, then jump to an even higher bar and grind to the end and perform another jump at the end of that bar. The issue here is that all the bars have squares around them, and in this game, ANY PLATFORM EDGE can be grinded on. This means 2/3rds of the time you will hit the platform rather than the bars you're trying to jump to. In addition if you jump too late you'll pass right through the bars. Every failed attempt loses you valuable time. After some point, it becomes unwinnable even if you make the jump. Most levels you have about 2 minutes time to complete all the objectives. I think there was about 15 levels? Each time you fail you keep your progress(mission objectives) and get about 3 retries. That means you can focus on one objective and really try to nail it down instead of doing them all in one go. Credits after the Acclaim level. Shout outs to Hobo City!

All in All, The average design of this game earned a 5.5 score. Wall-centric bouncing. Too many "small height" platforms. Some objectives aren't easy to tell WHERE they are on the Z-Axis. 3 Aforementioned objectives make this game a nightmare. Momentum gets killed A LOT. No tutorial or moveslist. Throwaway knockoff K-mart game.