The Bad News

More good

All the little details, from the sounds as you grind your board on a rail or your face on the pavement - it's here. Even occasional odd graphical or physics glitches from the original game are here. Landings you shouldn't have ever made still happen, as do weird "arm/leg through solid object" quirks. Yes, they're bugs, but minor points that didn't detract all that much from Pro Skater 1, so we have our doubts that they'll ever get in the way of your enjoyment.

That's just scary

A disembowled shadow?

Not So Good

Again, keep in mind that this is still just a demo of an unreleased game. It may not yet be optimized for my graphics card setup (Voodoo5 5500AGP), or any PC graphics card so far. Yet the symptoms feel a lot more like the bad stuff that goes along when you take a console game, slap the code in a PC, fix up some quirks to make up for driver deficiencies in sound and graphics boards, and you're set.

Sloppy my ass

Combos rock

Basically, that leaves you with no compensation for platform differences. The most notable problem with console to PC ports is in the graphical department. Part of that comes from the change in resolution. After all, one moment you have your sad little TV, the next a $400 monitor with more pixels available in one inch than a typical television set has in 5. Yet these pixels are smaller and a lot sharper. A TV set has a natural "smoothing" effect on the images it produces. Part of this is the distance/size issue. A 31" TV can be viewed comfortably from across the room. Gamers are often never more than two feet away from 19" monitors. Television pixels are less clearly defined, almost blending into each other - giving a crude and unintentional but somewhat effective form of anti-aliasing.

Faceplants don't

Who are those two guys in the graffiti?

However, when ported directly to a monitor, the effect is less than spectacular. I noticed this effect personally with Final Fantasy VII for PC and now Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Textures, especially the flat ground and sky, lack color and smoothness. There are sharp, visible lines where ground is supposed to mildly change to "dirtier" or "darker". With the sky, the effect is even more visible. Turning the Voodoo5's FSAA on and off alternately had almost no effect except the elimination of jaggies where polygon edges met. Regular textures like graffiti and character art had the smooth, almost-washed out effect anyway while there was no visible benefit to the sky or ground. Hmm... maybe some TV Out would help. We included shots with both 4X FSAA and no FSAA. See if you can spot the differences (the last ten shots are big, 100% quality JPEGs, five of each kind.)