Taste-Test: Aggressive Inline

Rated: T for Teen Developer: Z-Axis Publisher: Acclaim Players: 1-2 Saving: 57+ blocks

A man feels surprisingly confident waltzing into Blockbuster with a Games Freedom Pass. It's fun just being able to walk up and down the aisles of video games knowing that any one of these little babies could end up going home with me. When I did that today, I had no real idea of what I wanted to bring home. I just knew that I was done with Spiderman (review coming soon) and I needed a new game. I wasn't in the GameCube section for more than a second when I spotted Aggressive Inline. "What's this?" I said to myself. "The famed Tony Hawk killer? We'll just see about that." After a few odd looks from people wondering why I was talking to myself, I headed home with the game. Now, the easy thing to do would be to just compare the game to Tony Hawk and see how it stacks up. Well that may come someday but for now…

First of all, as with any extreme sports game, there is a learning curve and I highly suggest taking the tutorial. Aggressive Inline's tutorial is pretty decent and explains all your basic moves relatively well. The joystick is used to direct the skater; the A button jumps; the B button does midair grabs and tricks; the y button is used for grinding and hand plants; the X button performs vaulting (more on that later); pressing the Z button when landing on a ramp will result in a skitch that allows the player to keep a chain of tricks going; and the L and R buttons are used for hard right and left turns, spinning, and (when pressed together) making your character skate backwards.

So far the controls seem to work pretty well, except I have one criticism. Using the Y button for both grinding and hand plants is a little tough on the user. Unless you've got a pretty large angle, chances are your character will hand plant. This can be a little frustrating when you're trying to grind and you don't have the angle quite right. Also, I would have preferred a little more height when jumping, but no biggy.

That said, I must also say this, the vaulting in Aggressive Inline is absolutely brilliant. Pressing X in front of any waist high obstacle will make your character plant both hands on the obstacle and do a high flip over it. This addition to the skating scene allows the player create untold chains of tricks and I think brings a breath of fresh air into extreme sports gaming. Aggressive Inline also uses a concept called the "juice" meter. When in a level, there's no time limit, but you have to keep your juice level up or it's game over. You can raise your juice meter by performing tricks or grabbing juice power ups that are scattered across the terrain. Bails and wipeouts will cause your juice meter to fall. Fill your juice meter all the way up and your player is "on fire." He/She will then be able to perform their special moves and their attributes are boosted.

The levels in Aggressive Inline are downright huge. And that's even before several new areas in each level are unlocked. There are a total of 7 of these levels and each has about 20 challenges to be completed. You are told about 10 of these challenges at the beginning but the rest you have to unlock. That's right. It's not enough to complete all the challenges, you have to EARN the right to even know what some of them are. New challenges can be earned by talking to pedestrians, completing other challenges, and so on. Challenges range from earning a certain amount of points in a certain amount of time, to performing special stunts on the level's obstacles. Completing challenges will earn you points that boost your attributes and unlock new levels.

Ok, so far I'm about 3-4 levels into Aggressive in line and I must say I'm impressed. However, the burning question…is it better than Tony Hawk? Well in my opinion…No. Not yet anyway. Though a good game, I just don't have as much fun playing Aggressive Inline than I do Tony Hawk games. Thi could be due to a large number of things, but I'll get into it more in my review. Look for it in the coming week as I delve deeper into this great game.

Joseph Rodemeyer