Skate or Die. Yay or Nay?

[vintagegamecrazy]

I was going to write a review for this game, I may be biased but I can't stand it. Even back then I had little fun with it. What are your opinions on this old game. Also has anyone played the IBM version and know how it plays compared to the NES.

[namzep]

Man, I always loved the game as a kid but haven't played it in something like 15 years. Not sure how well I'd like to play it now.

[le geek]

The original C64 version is Awesome.

[Little Samson]

I remember thinking it was cool when I was kid (but not being very good at it). Replaying it as an adult, I didn't like it very much.

[ryborg]

Skate or Die was one of my favorite games as a kid. Today, it's basically unplayable as modern skaters like the Tony Hawk series are 1000 times better in every aspect. It has not aged well.

[norkusa]

Kind of tough to say. I played Skate Or Die a ton on the NES but I would only practice on the half pipe. I HATED all the other events.

[Kid Ice]

Loved Skate or Die for the C64. I did the trash can alley race about a million times (hopefully I am thinking of the right game and not something else).

[cyberfluxor]

HAha. I recall playing it at Funcoland and wasn't too bad. I've passed up on it every time in the wild because I have no attachment to it and it's a really old skating game now. Like what was stated earlier, Tony Hawk pretty much owns most other skating games with its gameplay.

[Greg2600]

Skate or Die was a cool game. There wasn't a hole lot you could do in it, only 5 different mini-games. It was fun for 2 players though, but the controls were a little strange.

[bangtango]

I enjoyed Skate or Die as a kid. The Jam (in the alley Kid Ice mentioned) and Downhill Race were my two favorite events. Joust was fun and at least had three difficulty levels. High Jump was nearly unplayable without a turbo controller like the NES Advantage. The half pipe tricks event was decent but again, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater allows you to do all of that and more in a much bigger area.

Today, though, the best part of the game is roaming around inside of Rodney's Skate Shop and looking at all the crap on the walls and in the store until a random caption comes up.

[Blitzwing256]

I was never a skating game fan at all (can't fucking stand the tony hawk games with all the aerial button mashing "skill" nonsnese) but as a kid for some reason I loved skate or die (bought it the same day I bought ultima exodus ,if you can guess what type of games I normally like) I liked how you had the high score lists for each event (wish it had a save feature) all of the events were pretty fun to play and try to beat top scores, especially the two downhill races/jam. lots and lots of little secrets to find, shortcuts and bonus points. the high jump and the pool joust were fairly lame, but overall I thought it was an amaznig game and easily the pinacle of skating games to ever come out.

[Sothy]

I wish someone would make a hack of 720 with the godamned bees removed.

wait...where am I?

[p_b]

I played it on an IBM, at least I'm quite sure I did. IIRC, it was quite ok graphics wise...Oh, and the playability didn't strike me as being completely off compared to the other versions.

[RASTAN]

Hated the game back then (though it was much better than 720), and it plays like crap in 2007. But I guess the genre had to start somewhere. I always thought the skate shop was cool though.

[DigitalSpace]

The NES game had a nice concept, but the controls ruin it.

[Little Samson]

The NES game had a nice concept, but the controls ruin it.

Yeah, that's right -- don't you have to hold "up" to skate straight forward, even though straight forward is usually down/left or down/right? And I seem to recall that to turn right, you have to push left, and vice-versa. Unless you want to skate "goofy foot", in which case everything's backwards. Does this really add realism to the game? Why not just design the game with one sensible set of controls instead of two confusing ones?

Anydangway, it's probably not that bad once you get used to it, but when you have four ravenous friends taking turns on the game, you never get much of a chance to figure it out. At least that was my experience.

[shoes23]

Wow, not a whole lotta love for Skate or Die. I personally still enjoy it quite a bit, but maybe it is an aquired taste. The Joust is still my favorite event, followed by the alley race. After you master the events there really isn't much to go back to, but I usually fire it up once a year and compete with some friends.

Skate or Die 2 is really much much better though, because of the halfpipe level and the digitilized voice on the title screen. "Ska..Ska..Ska..Skate or DIE!"

[Flack]

I think Skate or Die is like a lot of games ... if you grew up with it (like I did) you probably think it's awesome or at least have fond memories of it.

If you have never played the Commodore 64 version, check out this recording of the opening music. I can remember loading up this game simply to listen to this song at the time. The C64 version blows the NES version out of the water with the PC version in a distant third.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqRXxPl6bXA

To give you an idea on how far skating games have come, on the freestyle halfpipe event in Skate or Die you can only perform four basic moves (spins, grinds, handplants and eggplants).

[GrandAmChandler]

Skate or Die 2 for NES has one of the best sounds ever heard on an NES system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8TmIxHSBcU

-GAC-

[kainemaxwell]

Loved it when I was younger, but it didn't age well.

[robo3355]

Skate or Die 2 for NES has one of the best sounds ever heard on an NES system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8TmIxHSBcU

-GAC-

If you use an RF adapter with SOD2 the music skips, there's patches where it doesn't play. bizarre.

I have beaten skate or die 2 so much more fun comparatively, however I have a soft spot for SOD and the joust session.

[XianXi]

Skate or die was fun but I loved Skate or Die 2, especially the halfpipe.

[norkusa]

Skate Or Die 2 was the biggest disappointment ever. Every screen shot I saw of that game was of that bad ass double half pipe with the spine in the middle. When I played it though, all I got was a lame side scroller beat em up and never even got to the ramp. Where is it anyway?

[Little Samson]

Even though I had a rocky relationship with the NES version of Skate or Die, I did really enjoy the Game Boy games: Bad 'N Rad and Tour de Thrash.

[GrandAmChandler]

Skate Or Die 2 was the biggest disappointment ever. Every screen shot I saw of that game was of that bad ass double half pipe with the spine in the middle. When I played it though, all I got was a lame side scroller beat em up and never even got to the ramp. Where is it anyway?

It says it on the title screen. Press start for adventure, press select for Ramp.

So press "select" on the title screen after you rock out.

[j_factor]

I really enjoyed "Bad N' Rad" for Game Boy. Does that count?

[vintagegamecrazy]

Well I took some time to write my review for the game, it will appear in the reviews section at some point but for now I will post it here. Let me know what you think and don't ask me why I like writing reviews for these kind of games. I also never would have guessed that this topic would have garnered so much attention.

Quote:

This is another tough review to write and the only way I found to start this review was to include some back story as to why I am writing it. I recently reacquired this game for my collection and automatically wrote it off as a bad game. As a kid, I found it in a garage sale and it was so cheap and I was told it was cool at the time so I had to buy it. I remember telling someone in school that I got it and he said “The original Skate Or Die, that’s not a good game” As I played it, I realized that I didn’t like it too much either, another friend and tried to like it as we were broke and didn’t have too many good games so we played it for a while and never grew into it. I ended up getting rid of it and was glad to forget about it since it left a bad taste in my mouth.
I picked it up recently with another group of bad NES games and decided to review the stack, I got to this game and remembered my past experience and just wanted to forget about it and did for a while. I felt kind of biased towards it so I started reading other reviews and then posted on the message boards and decided to give it another try and finally write an unbiased review and see how well it held up over time.
As I played it I still wondered how the heck I was supposed rate this game? What kind of standards am I supposed to hold this game up to? As I pondered, the only thing I could come up with was the saying “a game should be as fun to play now as it was when it was released”.
I asked around and most people generally agreed that it was good, they also said that they enjoyed it back then but would have nothing to do with it nowadays and said it hasn’t aged well compared to modern games like Tony Hawk. I may just wholly agree with them. As I played the game I looked for things that made people not like it anymore, it may be the fact that we don’t want to admit that we thought mohawks were cool back then, but I think it actually is a rather shallow game with basic game play but it was embraced for the fact that it was one of the few skate boarding games of the day. I played on and was able to quell some of the hatred I had for the game and while I didn’t love it, I began to see why so many enjoyed it back then, I wasn’t able to stand it for more than about 15 minutes though and I was ready for something else. I did realize however that it fit perfectly into the section of games that you could kill 15 or 20 minutes of time with a few friends and have some great laughs in the same way the old fixed screen arcade games ported to the NES could.
The game starts you in a skate shop and the owner has a (you guessed it) mohawk and you can register and compete in different events. One of the biggest shortcomings that I have is that you aren’t able to save any stats, just register, compete and restart all over again some other time. You can pick five events to skate in, Joust Pool in which you skate around an empty pool and knock eachother off your boards, this is one of the better events and can be quite enjoyable with someone else. There is a race where you basically race downhill, do tricks and dodge obstacles, this is probably the best event but it is still terribly short. Jam has you race an opponent down an alley and you can attack eachother as well, this feels very limited and generic and is rather boring and dull. The Halfpipe lets you do tricks and get a high score though you are limited to only four tricks. The High Jump is the last one and is nearly impossible to do anything without a turbo controller, it is considered by most as the worst event and a reason why the game is disliked so by many. These may all seem like a lot of fun to screw around with but they are extremely short and simple and you run out of things to do to quickly. The game offers nothing as far as rewards no matter how good you do and doesn’t have a save feature so boredom sets in quickly.
The music and sound effects are very average and make me feel extra bored while playing. Graphics on the other hand are actually one of the more amusing points of the game, they are by no means great and are probably below average for their time but some of the animations are quite funny. When your on the halfpipe you can wipe out and splatter on the ground or even lose your head, there are more as well, they are worth a couple of cheap laughs with a few bored friends but, again, they won’t hold your attention for ever.
Like I said before, I can see how some have fond memories of the game but try as I might, I can’t help but feel that the game is just slightly above average and that’s it. There was too many games that had too much more to offer over this game, it hasn’t aged well almost 20 years later so it’s not worth a whole lot of time. My final verdict on the game is a 5.5/10 it could be tagged as a forgotten fond memory in the days of the NES.

Graphics 5
Sound 5
Game Play 6
Overall 5.5

Quote:

[bangtango]

I've already replied here but I do have one other thing to add.

When I was younger, every kid I knew owned a copy of this game. Every kid. It was as common in my neighborhood, in my school and among my friends as Mario/Duck Hunt.

Yet this is also one of the most common NES games that I have never found in the wild. I've gotten copies in trades locally, stuff like that, but never found it laying around used in a store.