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"Changing the face of extreme sport games"

When you think extreme sports, you may think of the obvious Tony Hawk, SSX, and any game made by Midway, but something tells me the fine game, Aggressive Inline, didn't even cross your mind. Aggressive Inline for the GameCube takes the addictive gameplay of such past extreme sports games and adds the lesser known sport of inline skating to make a very exciting combo of the best of both worlds. Throw in some truly revolutionary ideas and this game becomes an unstoppable creation... or does it? Let me break it down in to some sub-categories to get the true scoop on this excellent game.

Gameplay - If you have ever played a game such as any in the Tony Hawk series or other objective based sport games, you'll feel right at home with the gameplay of Aggressive Inline. First off, I would like to state that the experience system used in this game to gain stats is one of the best ideas to ever grace the extreme sports community. In previous games, stats were usually bought or earned. This game uses an RPG style experience system that improves your stats based on how you use them. It really makes you think about how you are comboing and has you include more aspects in order to gain all your stats up to the high level of 10. A pretty good idea added in to this is a structure featuring no time limit. When I first dived in to the game I thought to myself of how incredibly easy this game must be. Far off I was when I soon learned that this actually added quite a bit of depth to an already addictive gameplay system. This allows for new objectives such as accumulated point totals and such. So you ask, without a time limit how can you lose? Simple. This game runs on a ''juice'' system. Your character has a bar on the top that meters how much juice your characters has. It works just like in the Tony Hawk system where when it's full, you get boosts and can do secret moves. The catch is, if it runs out, you lose. When you lose, you'll have to pay up to 100,000 of your precious points to continue. This allows you to make sure you keep on doing tricks and such. Have a lack of juice? No problem. This game has juice boxes all over the level including hard to find ones that raise your juice bar for good. If you wonder how this works, just look at the cash system of the Tony Hawk series. Speaking of objectives, this game offers a whopping 20-35 objectives per level. Most of these are not available at the beginning as the game makes you work to get what you deserve. To do this, the levels are fully interactive. For example, if you complete a certain mission in the first level, something may possible be triggered to allow for a whole different setting. To increase the interactivity, keys are hidden in other levels to unlock hidden sections in your later/former level. This may sound confusing, but it makes you play all the levels evenly instead of mastering one at a time. These inter activities do not come without a price though as this game takes up MEGA pages on your memory card. You want to save your career? You better be ready to shell out 57 pages of your precious memory card space. This doesn't include 2 pages needed if you are in to creating a skate park. Speaking of, if you enjoy creating skate parks, you may consider this editor to be ''sub par'' This may just be my opinion, but it seems like you really have a lack of options in creating your park. Also, if you enjoy creating skaters like me, forget it! Acclaim just happened to leave out any form of a character editor which is really a shame (not that I'd have the space left to save one any ways). Another problem is game glitches. They aren't extremely serious, but this game does have some obnoxious glitches including the falling through floors on certain levels.

Sound - If you are into the skating, this music will most likely be right up your alley. The soundtrack includes but is not limited to such artists as Sublime and P.O.D., of course, if you're into the whole rap scene there are plenty of songs to suit your needs as well. I would say this game has a wonderful soundtrack, but I feel that a few of the songs just don't feel right considering the gameplay. Either way, you can easily edit the track list in the menu and take the songs you don't like out of the rotation. While this may seem extremely simple, it saves you some trouble of manually changing when they come up. While the skaters themselves do not have voices, fully interactive characters are to be found all over this game. Included in this are voices for each character and explanations on objectives they give you. It really spruces up the series and adds a larger feel of realism (even with the out of the world objectives this game can have). When it comes to sound effects, you won't find anything special other than the grinding effect and a few different terrain sounds, but this is a good thing.

Graphics - The visuals of this game are up to the standards of today's games, even surpassing most other extreme sport games. Included in this is the clothing motion that you really don't see often, even some of the secret characters hair moves on the jumps. The whole clothing thing is obviously most seen when using Chrissy as I'm sure most hormone driven adolescents are using. Either way, it adds a real sense of realism to the insane objectives and gives the game a character feel. Levels are real large and other than multiplayer mode, I couldn't find any significant frame rate drops. Multiplayer mode was a little different for this, but I'll go more in depth on that later on in the review.

Controls - Ever played Dave Mirra 2 for the Gamecube? If so, you'll feel right at home with the controls. This almost came to an annoyance to me as manuals changed from Dave Mirra 2 to Aggressive Inline and I kept confusing them. Now, I am pretty used to it and am comboing up like I never have before! The lack of customizable controls can be rather annoying when playing this game if you don't feel right at home. It makes sense that Acclaim wouldn't allow much customizing as it would make some moves simply to easy to pull off lowering the difficulty of the game overall. The spin buttons are conveniently placed as the Left and Right triggers. I don't find myself using them enough, but they are extremely handy. Get used to using the D-Pad for some of the tricks as the analog seems to feel a bit unresponsive when pulling off moves that aim at the diagonals. It will become second nature eventually, so don't let this get in your way of having fun.

Replayability - The replay level on this game is right up there with all the other extreme sport games as it runs on a character based system. What does this mean? Well, each character has it's own game making you play through the game many different times. The downside of this system is that there is no incentive in playing it with more than one character to increase your stats. Replayability is huge either way as there are numerous pro skaters to play as (10 I counted), 2 fictitious female characters, and 1 secret character for each level. Actually finishing the game should come off no problem. Getting 100% on each level is a completely different story. Don't think when you've completed all the objectives, the game is done. There are still items to collect such as all the juice boxes, secret moves, and even secret stat boosters that can really be hidden. Also this game has hidden objectives that you'll have to find by doing crazy things that can seem nearly impossible to complete. Let me also tell you that the levels are huge and most likely 2-3 times larger than your average game with around 8 levels in the game plus a tutorial. Sadly, this game does not contain the usually videos of professionals doing their magic when you finish the game with them. The only unlockable videos are the cut scenes from each levels which aren't exactly exciting.

Multiplayer - The multiplayer system found in this game is rather interesting. It introduces some completely new game ideas including a skating version of blackjack, the search for animals, and even one where you must find hidden eggs sprayed throughout the level. Also, you have the usual highest score and highest combo games that you all know from other games. There is a serious lack of what levels can actually be played on and also some levels feature the occasional frame rate drop even though it'll be barely noticeable when it does exist.

The Lowdown
Positives
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1) Innovative additions to the usual extreme sport game formula.
2) Innovative multiplayer ideas also.
3) The whole game just works so well together.

Negatives
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1) Occasional Glitches such as falling through floors
2) 57 pages required to save career!
3) No create-a-skater mode.

Players? - 1-2 Players
Save Option? - Memory Card - 57 pages career, 2 pages created park - 59 pages total
Purchase? - If you're a fan of ANY extreme sport game, this game will fit perfectly in your collection. If not, you need to at least rent this game as it's quite a nice package.


Reviewer's Score: 9/10 | Originally Posted: 08/09/02, Updated 08/09/02

"Best Extreme Sports Game on the Cube...as of now."

Before Acclaim decided to make extreme sport games about pimps and rabid midget “Ladies of the evening,” Acclaim had Z-Axis working on it’s Dave Mirra line of BMX bike games. They were known to be overall ok games, but they lacked the certain polish that the Tony Hawk games had. However, Neversoft took a back seat when Z-Axis came up with Aggressive Inline, the best extreme sports game to date. Z-Axis really went out of their way to push the genre to new heights. At first, this game was just one Playstation 2, but it was ported to Gamecube and Xbox later on. The Gamecube controller may not seem to be the most intuitive controller for this type of game, but it proves reasonable.

Controls are standard for this type of game, modeled after the Tony Hawk games. A is jump, B is grab, Y is grind. The X button is vault, which allows you to grab onto pipe sticking out of the ground and spin, adding points. Vault also makes it easier to get out of bowls and to grab onto vehicles that are driving around. The L trigger spins you left, and the R trigger spins you right, giving you multipliers onto your trick score. The Z button is the Cess Slide, basically a revert, to keep lines going. Though you think the Gamecube controller is basically a colored boomerang, it works well.

Gameplay: 9.4
Though if you buy this game out of the blue, it may seem like a THPS rip-off if you look at the cover, Neversoft actually took ideas FROM it. Aggressive Inline’s main mode does not have any timer; you could just skate around for hours looking around, a feature that Tony Hawk stole from it. Aggressive Inline features expansive levels, full of items and other goodies for you to find. When you first start a level, it can be a little cramped at first, but if you skate around, collecting challenges that are scattered around the area, more and more parts of the level open up, for even more challenges to do. For example, in the first level, the movie lot, it just may be a large street at first, but explore, you can find the stage of a horror movie. Even more, you could unlock a scientist’s laboratory; all in the same level. Each level (there are seven of them) is chocked full of secrets, like different challenges, new moves, and attribute boosters.

Each character begins with the bare-bones minimum or attributes: Rarely will you see any attribute in the beginning over 2. Your attributes grow in a Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind type of way: The more you do something, you can a level in that. Soon enough, the wood pushers will be at the top of the heap if you try and level up. In addition to work based stats, Aggressive Inline also features a life meter. Every time you do a trick, your life meter gains a little juice. The higher scoring points give you more juice than lower scoring ones, and if you combine tricks, you could easily fill up your meter in one line. Once your meter has filled up, your skates begin giving off sparks, and your speed and jump attributes higher, making it easier to perform tricks. When your life bar gets completely depleted, you must spend points to play again.

The real meat of the gameplay is in career mode, where you select a character to skate and level up with. In each level, you have challenges that are open to you from the beginning, or you can skate around and find them. Many are point themed challenges: getting certain amount of points in a minute, or cumulative, where overall, you must get two million points in a level. Though that seems crazy at first, you will notice the points just keep racking up. Others usually involve grinding on special areas that could change the entire landscape of the level. Each level features something peculiar that is tracked in your career mode stats, like how many lightning strikes happened the airfield level.

Career mode is not the only thing, as you have Free Skate (just wander around) 2 minute run (try and gain as many points as possible!) and VS. Mode, which is standard. Only 2 player though, so the extra ports on the GC and Xbox get wasted. Overall, it brings more to the table than any other extreme sports title today.

Graphics: 8.6
Pretty rough around the edges with the characters, but the environments look superb, full of detail and color. Each character moves and looks just like their real world counterpart (if they have one) except that everyone has elbows that are quite pointy, and the women in the game do have...bouncy...assets (maybe a precursor to XXX, I guess.) A few levels, mostly the cannery and airfield, look quite drab, but colorful levels like the movie lot and the boardwalk make up for it. Though pop-up is to be found, it only happens in a few levels, when your character is not at the same altitude as the object. Very few times will you be able to notice the game switch out a low poly model to a high one, something that you could easily tell in many games that have an overabundance of trees or jagged scrub. The movies in the game, unlike many PS2 to GC ports, are not grainy due to disk space, and look great. Framerate holds up fine, and it should, for a game that moves at a generally slow pace should not have sudden drops while landing, which could lead the player to screw up one last trick. Though not the best looking extreme sports game on the market today, it holds up well after almost two years for other companies to improve upon it.

Sound and Audio: 9.2
Though not as plentiful as any of the Tony Hawk games, Aggressive Inline delivers better songs and better voice acting. Aggressive Inline features bands such as Hoobastank, Sublime, and Reel Big Fish (hey, if like Ska, Aggressive Inline has the soundtrack for you!) Each level begins with a different song, but they all go in order, and you could just take out a song that you hate (but most of the them are superb.) The voice acting that you hear throughout the levels is well done and uproariously at best, and never dumb, and heavily clichéd at times. If you bump into a judge, you will hear a southern gentlemen like voice, and if you knock over some clowns, chuckles and honks squeak out. Insects go splat, Lightning goes KRACK, and when you fall down, you can hear it. However, hearing the same sound effects over and over again does get repetitive, but you could turn down the audio and music in the options menu, making just like a mix of your favorite Ska tunes...on a GC mini-DVD! Oh, and wonders of menus.

Replay: 8.8
Just going through one player in career mode will take you a pretty long time, and trying to do it with every character will make this game’s full single player experience to be quite long. However, the most many people would be able to stomach maybe two or three characters before the single player game (really, the only flaw in Aggressive Inline is that the career mode is the same for every character, and not different challenges.) Create-a-Park is bare bones to say the least; Small parks, and you unlock more parts in Career Mode, so trying to make the best part imaginable when you start the game first is impossible. Vs. Mode is ok, but lacking 4 player support could be reprimanded. Career mode is the best thing going for it, and if you want to share that with your friends, it is neigh impossible. If Z-Axis was able to put in a Create-a-Player and better Create-a-Park editing tools, you could be looking at a game that is unequaled in everything, until Tony Hawk (insert number here) comes to dethrone it.

Overall, Aggressive Inline a game that everyone should try.



Reviewer's Score: 9/10 | Originally Posted: 10/28/03