At a hundred and twenty dollars, [DJ Hero] rests on the same lofty economic perch as the recently released Tony Hawk Ride. It is as though Activision came up with the price point first, and then arrayed products against it, in some feat of holiday tactics. We purchased a copy yesterday, but our own experience with Ride was almost completely incoherent. I'm not certain how much more time we'll be putting into it.
Without going on and on, this board thing is simply not preferable to a controller, and may be worse in key ways. It is difficult to stand on and use, ergonomically it is suspect and occasionally dangerous. There are novelties to it, certainly - reaching down to cover one of the sensors on the side results in a "grab," which looks and feels pretty cool. But now I've seen it. Everything you want to do is now more difficult, and for the price, you can buy two other games. Which is to say, two good games. That's more or less what I'm getting at.
I imagine that playing the game is very easy for Tony Hawk, a person who makes a living twisting his body with precision while in mid-air. I would say that mid-air twisting is something I get up to with less frequency. I might suggest that I invest my leisure hours in videogames quite often, where slight, precise inputs are interpreted by a piece of software as grand gestures. If this is the embodiment of the franchise going forward, they've made the last skating game I have any intention of purchasing from them.
I never actually lost my balance so utterly that I fell on my fucking ass, but the board itself not a stable platform, almost entirely convex on the bottom. On more than one occasion, in an attempt to demonstrate the full extent of his dominion over the sport, Gabriel spun all the way around and fell. Injury was the result. For my part, the time I spent with the device called to mind a newborn foal, unable to find purchase on the wet hay of the birthing stall. In other words, the experience mirrored exactly our time spent on actual skateboards. So, in this way, Ride's simulation of the sport may be called absolute.