The return of Electronic Arts’ skate. series is a live-service, multiplayer venture developed by Full Circle. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s a fairly faithful reboot, adapting the original trilogy’s beloved Flick-It control system and keeping the same relatively grounded atmosphere but also embracing the absurdity of the medium. Its controversial, online-only vision to become a destination for not only skating, but simply hanging out is also quite interesting, but I can’t help but feel skate. is desperately missing one of the series’ best features.
For all that Skate has long gotten right with its gameplay and its depiction of skating culture, it’s also made a hilarious tradition out of an unavoidable part of real-life skateboarding: bailing. This is where Skate embraces the inherent wackiness of video games, implementing satisfying ragdoll physics so that a flubbed trick can turn into a beautiful disaster of a bail. The latest iteration, however, is missing the Hall of Meat, which now more than ever needs to make a comeback.
Skate 4 Doesn’t Have The Full Hall Of Meat Experience
So Close, Yet So Far Away
Bailing is still a big part of the new skate., it just doesn’t go far enough to include the Hall of Meat, which has appeared in every previous game. Hall of Meat gets its name from iconic skateboarding magazine Thrasher, which uses the term online to spotlight particularly gnarly skating accidents. It started off rather plain: in the original Skate, if your character took enough damage on any given bail, a skeleton diagram popped up, providing a summary of the bones you broke and the body parts you sprained.
Skate 2 gamified the Hall of Meat more, assigning point values to certain fractures and injuries. I remember spending hours on end with my friends just flying off the tallest spots in the game, trying to hit obstacles on the way down to see who could get the highest score. The new skate. actively encourages similar activities, but without the Hall of Meat, a lot of the charm has been lost.
Skate’s Bail Challenges Aren’t The Same Without The Hall Of Meat
Give Me All The Bodily Harm Statistics
The Hall of Meat’s exclusion is all the more disappointing since the general framework for it to be implemented is already in skate. All over San Vansterdam there are challenges to earn Rip Chips by bailing in a certain way – hit certain objects, spread-eagle your way through a specific structure, etc. Your character’s invulnerability is even hand-waved away as a miracle of modern science. It feels so obviously poised to include Hall of Meat stats that their absence is incredibly noticeable.