Ultimate Skateboard Park Tycoon

Being able to design, build and manage our own skate park would have been a too-good-to-be-true opportunity back then. Well, I can’t travel back to those days of skateboarding days gone by, but I can now do one thing I dreamed of: Create, build, and run my very own skate park with the assistance of a new PC title, Activision’s Ultimate Skateboard Park Tycoon.

This game is part of Activision’s Value Publishing software, which is the publisher’s growing array of titles for under $20 dollars. Having mentioned that price, however, you should be aware before reading any further that a title coming into the market at 20 bucks or less probably isn’t going to challenge for any Game of the Year awards. And that certainly is the case with Ultimate Skateboard Park Tycoon (USBPT).

What you get is a poor man’s The Sims meets Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, as Activision tries to incorporate a little bit of the elements that make both those titles so fun into USBPT.

Take the character and living environment-building aspects of the Sims and cross it with the skateboarding action and skate park editor features of THPS2 and you get the idea of what USBPT’s flavor is supposed to be. The taste USBPT’s gameplay leaves behind isn’t quite as palatable as either of those two games, however.

It also sponges heavily from the many tycoon titles that are prevalent in today’s stores like Railroad, Golf Resort, Fast Food, Ski Resort, (soon-to-be-released) Zoo, and Monopoly Tycoon. The crucial strategy in tycoon games is to run a successful business. And that is what you primarily set out to do with USBPT. The basic premise is to use all the variable building materials at your disposal to set up and successfully run your own skateboard park.

You can get a good idea of what you need to concentrate your building resources on by checking out the emotion bubbles of the park visitors.

Borrowing from The Sims, a skater will let you know what he is thinking about by the bubbles above his head. There is also a list of his most recent thoughts. If a skater is looking to down some cold soda to quench that thirst all his skating has built up, he will let you know by the appearance of a soda cup in his thought bubble. If you don’t already have one, a soda machine should be built to alleviate this guy’s lack of a cold beverage.

There are three basic park locations available when you first start the game: Parking Lot, Mansion Property, and Big Skatepark. There is also a tutorial available to give you some beginner instruction. During gameplay, tips are available if you cannot understand any aspect of the game, which can be real handy early on. Once you get the gist of the game, though, playing USBPT is a snap.

After picking one of the three areas, you can start to build a custom designed park using ramps, half-pipes, rails, pools and almost any other skateboarding obstacle building materials that you can think of.

Levels are clear-cut in their look; not too bland but not exactly a lot of imagination goes into their overall design. The best of the three to make a varied and successful park is the Parking Lot, which offers plenty of grinding walls and rails already incorporated into its design and also gives you room to build ramps and half-pipes while letting you have a separate section for concessions and sponsors.

You are looking to create a profitable park too, so you get to develop your tycoon skills as well. Giving you some help initially is a start-up bankroll ranging from $50,000 to $5,000 depending on which difficulty level you select. You control the food concessions, T-shirt and skateboard shops, and the prices of food and merchandise within. The lower the price of the food, T-shirts and skateboards, the more you will sell. But that cuts into your profit margin, so learning the proper pricing techniques helps your bottom line immensely.

All the sponsor contracts are handled through you also. These deals can help you not only make a fun park to skate, but increase your bank account. Attracting sponsors isn’t hard, really. All you have to do is build some popular skate areas in your park to draw more skateboarders. Once sponsors see you have a hip and rad park, they will offer you contracts to set up one of their sponsorship booths.

On the other side of the gameplay coin is the ability to take over the control of one of your park’s visitors and skate a la THPS. This is where the game suffers most. The frame rate gets real S-L-O-W when you decide to take your board out for a ride around the park. In a skateboarding game, speed and the ability to get big air on the half-pipe is important for overall gaming enjoyment. Neither is really attainable in USBPT. This creates a pedestrian experience for those used to the higher-paced action of the THPS games. It isn’t terribly difficult to pull off skate moves. Using the control and shift keys in combination with the up, down, left and right arrows on your keyboard pulls off one of 29 specific air and grind skating moves, like the Benihana, Madonna, Christ, 50-50 Grind and the Blunt Slide. While there is the ability to use a joystick, the keyboard is a better choice to let you pull some hot skate moves.

No big-name skateboarders can be found here. But you can rename the skaters in the park, so in addition to letting you be the star of your own game (as with THPS2), I guess you could change the monikers of some of the other skaters. Don’t, however, expect the Tony Hawk of your customized USBPT to have any resemblance in either looks or skills to the actual Tony Hawk.

Skaters are average-looking visually at best. But the parks themselves, what you build and the sponsor booths and concessions are visually more impressive than I expected.

Music, delivered by Formula 1, isn’t too bad, but gets real repetitive real fast. Unlike the THPS and Mat Hoffman’s Pro BMX titles by Activision, there is no collection of great music here. While the tunage isn’t bad, it can get annoying when you have been sitting at your PC for a while building a park and grinding some rails hearing the same three songs over and over. In fact, by the shameless promotion of Formula 1 and its album, Slim Pickins On Bass, I suspect that someone in the group MUST be related to one of the game’s developers.

You can pick any point of the park that has some type of item or structure (such as a ramp or a concession stand) and use the camera option to get an up-close and personal 3D view of the structure or item and its surroundings. This proves useful, too. Using the camera can give you a chance to see if there are any flaws in your park’s layout and design. That’s a big issue, too. If you don’t build a well structured half-pipe, the skaters will stay far away and your park’s success will suffer.

The absence of any type of internet options is a slight disappointment. A great gameplay mode would have been if you could have trained your skaters and challenged other USBPT owners to online competition. But even though multiplayer options would have been cool, it not being available isn’t really a detriment to the games’ enjoyment.

No, this isn’t THPS2 or The Sims. But it has its selling points. The park building options are easy to navigate, and being able to ride in your own custom skateboard park to your heart’s content or in an exhibition isn’t a bad way to spend some PC gaming time, even though you won’t be able to match your need for speed.

What you ultimately get is a $20 dollar game that plays like it. For any higher price, this title would have gotten a lower score. But if they threw some more money into developing the skating aspect of the game, it may have merited favorable comparison to THPS and conceivably could have been worth $50 bucks.

- Lee Cieniawa