Andy Mac, child labor law violations, and.. another Andy Mac? - Backyard Skateboarding review
Short version: Backyard Skateboarding is a 2004 kids’ skateboarding game from the Backyard Sports series, released on PC and Game Boy Advance. This review covers the PC version. It has keyboard-only controls, invisibly fast tricks, nonstop voice acting and a plot that ends with a skatepark on the moon. It’s not the worst game on the channel, but it’s not worth playing.
Hey bros. Today, we’re gonna rip into the bodacious Backyard Skateboarding. I’ve gotten lots of recommendations to play this game, but I never managed to track a copy down until recently. And I wish I didn’t.
The Backyard Sports series
Backyard Skateboarding was part of the Backyard Sports series, where they made all kinds of kid-focused sports games, like basketball, football, soccer, and hockey. In 2004, they made the jump into skateboarding. That was the same year that THUG2 came out. So set your standards there when we start talking about the gameplay. It came out on PC and Game Boy Advance, but I’m only going to torture myself so much today.
Picking a character (and Andy Mac)
You start off by picking your character. You can choose between Andy Mac and lazy or potentially racist caricatures.
Yeah, Andy Mac. He’s shown up on the channel a few times. He had his own game back in the day, MTV Skateboarding with Andy Mac. He’s the default option in this game too. I did a Retro Rippers episode on the guy a while back. He seemed pretty much insufferable when he was younger.
But this is the kid version of Andy Mac. The voice isn’t done by him, which doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. There’s also another version of him later that sounds totally different. We’ll get to that in a bit though.
Let’s say, like me, you don’t want to be Andy Mac. What are your other choices?
“My name is Achmed! Achmed Khan!”
“Hola!”
That’s Pablo Sanchez. It’s cool that they wanted to have some diversity here, but having characters with fake accents doesn’t age very well. And your character talks constantly. It’s the worst. I went with the nerd, Dmitri, because this was basically me as a kid.
“I calculate we are wasting time.”
NPCs in the game aren’t any better.
A competition, sort of
OK, so the game is set up like a Dew Tour type thing, except that it’s all in backyard types of locations. The challenges you do are mostly just getting things for people. How this is a competition at all is beyond me. Like, does this kid set the Christmas decorations back up as soon as you’re done for the next kid to try to beat your time?
Is this all a sham? Am I actually helping neighborhood kids? Who’s behind all of this? The announcer, Eric Stream, is clearly using a stage name. Is he setting up these scenarios to make some kind of sick snuff film of kids falling down? Probably. I bet that’s where the plot will go.
Controls
Let’s take a minute and look at the controls and tricks. They’re terrible.
The control scheme is keyboard-only. Space bar ollies, and the C, V, and B keys are grinds, grabs and flips. Steer with the arrow keys. It’s very uncomfortable. By the time you’re used to it, the game will be over.
It actually causes a lot of problems too. Imagine being 8 years old, the target audience of this game, and having to do this special trick: “Left, Up + Grab, Grab.” What does this mean? The game doesn’t explain it until the next level, but you can’t leave this level until you do the trick. In this case, it’s simple. Hit left then up and then double tap grab. But because this is a keyboard and not a controller, there are no diagonals. So it’ll ask you to hit two directions at the same time with a plus sign instead of a comma. It’s weird, and actually more complicated than Tony Hawk.
Tricks: a C-
So let’s look at the tricks. I really can’t complain about them, because they’re invisibly fast. There’s a frontside impossible and a backside impossible. What’s the difference? I couldn’t possibly tell. 360 flips are called 360 varial kickflips, which isn’t great. But really, anything could be happening in the 5 frames the trick takes. What possible reason could they have had for doing this? What’s the point of even animating all these tricks if nobody can even see them?!
How about the grinds? They seem okay. I could barely get them to work though. Almost every arrow combination I tried just ended up getting me into a nosegrind.
You’ve got the rest of the classics though, like 5-0s and noseslides, and… Orion’s Belt. Which is clearly just a backside noseblunt. But then again, the frontside noseblunt is also a backside noseblunt.
Yeah, okay, so the tricks get a C-. It would be lower, but I’ve seen some real bottom tier trash working on this channel. You can have games like The Simpsons where they just took a couple of real tricks and renamed them, like impossibles being called improbables. You’ve got Evolution Skateboarding with “pop heels” and “5-zero grinds.” You’ve got Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure, which runs on the Tony Hawk engine, but every character only has 2 tricks…. I could go on. Having a handful of tricks that are okay and roughly in the realm of actual skateboarding tricks is actually a passing grade because those other idiots wrecked the curve.
The voice acting and sound
Oh, remember Andy Mac? We found him again.
I’m going to try to spare you as much of the voice acting and sound effects as I can. While he’s talking, the rolling sound just keeps looping. When your special or “juice” meter is full, there’s a pounding heartbeat sound that loops. The announcers are constantly talking, and they repeat the same stuff over and over.
But it gets even worse than that. There’s one incredibly monotone character, and they have constant noise in the background, like someone brushing off the microphone and cracking their knuckles and coughing.
Why? If you played this as a little kid, you probably didn’t care. But your parents did! I guarantee they hated this playing in the background while they were trying to fight over the credit card bill. So was it just put in to torture them? Is this why your parents don’t love you? Probably.
How the tour works
Let’s get back to the tour. So there are 5 yellow challenges. Beat 3 and you’ll unlock the 5 orange challenges. Beat 3 of those, and you’ll unlock the boss challenge. What happens when you beat that?
You recruit the boss for your team, and you get sponsors. Wait, are you joining my team, or am I joining yours? How does sponsorship work again? And if you don’t upgrade your clothes, the announcers make fun of you. Let’s ignore the weird consumerism message of having a game for babies designed around getting free product and sponsorship and just look at the second level.
Wait, how do I get to the second level?
Guess what, idiot, you have to beat Sally’s challenge first. Who’s Sally? Is she marked on the map somewhere? What significance does she have? Mind your business. Just do it.
In the first level, she was last. I just did every single challenge and happened to find Sally last. She wanted me to find some spatulas that the cooks dropped… in midair? This challenge isn’t special in difficulty or story relevance, or any other reason that should keep me from level 2. But it did let me fall through the ground.
In the next level, I did Sally’s challenge really early and instantly jumped to the third level by accident without even beating the boss.
Later I had to go back and beat all those challenges I missed so I could go to the moon. Yeah, I think that’s what the ending is. But we’ll get there.
Level 2: child labor
So what are we doing in this level? Mostly helping child laborers with their jobs. This little kid needs to paint a railing, so we have to grind it to scare off the birds. Scaring birds is a time-honored tradition in skateboarding games, so that’s fine. The fact that they have a 10 year old painting a whole boat by himself isn’t so great.
This little kid is a security guard, and she needs you to get her keys so she can open up. And by “her key,” I mean all FIFTEEN keys she needs to open the gate. Which she doesn’t use, because the door sinks into the ground and disappears.
This redneck kid wants to go fishing, and he needs marshmellers for bait. Don’t ask questions. Just collect the thing and move on. A lot of the challenges are different variations on this kind of stuff, and I can’t complain too much. You’re following a line and skating. They aren’t reusing assets or characters too much, and there’s always some kind of twist or comedy angle to it. Back in the first level, there’s even one where you run some shoes up the flagpole.
But there are more challenges too. There’s a “do the tricks they call out” challenge in level 2. This is where they teach you what the commas and plus signs actually mean.
These are actually kind of tough. The first few tricks are always super easy, but when you get into double taps and diagonals and stuff, it can sometimes take a few attempts to actually do what it wants. But it’s more awkward controls than actual difficulty.
There are lines too, which is a nice change of pace. In one of them, I have to grind on the whales and then do two laps around the pool.
Level 3: the rooftop
The third level is a rooftop. You raise some flags and collect laundry. I’m still a little baffled about how this is a touring skate competition. This girl loses her laundry so consistently that they can make an event out of it?
The hardest challenge in the game is a manual you have to do. I have to hold it and then steer around somewhere, but I couldn’t figure out what the route was for a while. And then I had trouble trying to steer and balance for a while. It’s no switchback challenge in Tony Hawk 4, but it took me a few…. Wait, is it playing a song about “Skinny BRITCHES”? It’s an instrumental song. They could have called it anything. And I’m pretty sure it was made for this game for 10 year olds. And they named it after skinny “britches”? What?
The really unique thing in this level is trying to turn on the lights for the helicopters. They are, of course, triggered by skateboards, so you have to do grinds to turn on the helipad lights and the spotlights. One thing I’ll say about this game is that it’s not lazy. This is at least a different set piece from the rest of the game.
Level 4: the castle
The next level is a medieval castle, except it’s in England Town in America. It’s home to a jousting challenge where you have to grind on the lance. It’s not a terrible idea. You kind of stop dead when you start the grind though, and that’s not really right.
This level has my favorite joke in it too: the knights of the octagon table. Eh, eh? You get it?
It’s also got a challenge where you have to collect gears, but they look like video game controllers to me. Whatever. Overall, I think this level is pretty cool.
The dragon, the skatepark and the moon
OK, so I’ve cleared all of the boss challenges except the last one. Winning this will win me the championship, and a skatepark for my town… Sort of?
What do I have to do to get this skatepark? I’m thrown in the dungeon to defeat the dragon. Yeah, for real. This is a theme park with a robotic child-killing dragon locked up in the basement. Luckily it can be defeated by doing airs over it and collecting diamonds. I should mention, airing over things is really frustrating. They give you these nice arrows to follow, but you can’t actually take that angle. Once I figured out how to do it, it wasn’t that bad.
So I think this is the plot. I’m competing to get a skatepark made for my town. But who’s paying for it? Is it championship money? That can’t be right, because I had to get sponsors to pay for it. Are the sponsors paying with the condition that I take home the championship? Am I just getting sponsors and I don’t even know about the announcers following me around in the blimp?
But wait. The skatepark we get is on the moon. But my town is on the earth. So I competed to win a skatepark that my town has exclusive access to on the moon? Or…
“Our favorite team has won!”
Wait, I was on a team this whole time? I really have no idea what’s going on with this game.
The final level
So I have this last level, and the ending is to do an ultra rad stunt that will kick off a concert. You might think that the moon would have moon physics, or maybe look or feel like the moon somehow. But it doesn’t, and the announcers’ blimp still works. Wait, is this a moon-themed park with a dome over it, and we’re all just pretending? I’m trying my best not to think about it, but I can’t help it.
So I collect some alien eggs, which is repulsive, and do band stuff, like collect backstage passes and collect drum parts for this racist cartoon.
The level design isn’t that bad. There are lots of tracks to grind around, and they always make it obvious where you’re supposed to go.
Before we wrap up the game, we better check in with Andy Mac. He has an unmarked mission in every level where you can collect part of his board. But even though I only did one of them, he’s here anyway to introduce the final challenge in a lazy New York accent.
Then I beat the game. Not only do you not actually get to see the trick I did, but the concert is silent. I turned off background music in the menu, but you’d think that the ending cinematic would still play. That’s fine. I’m sure it’s the worst.
Is it worth playing?
So that’s Backyard Skateboarding. Is it the worst game I’ve ever played? No, but that’s just because I torture myself for your entertainment. It’s not terrible. But I can’t imagine a world where you would want to fire this up and play it in your free time. Just leave that to me.
The good news for me was that the entire game, start to finish, took about an hour and a half. You could probably 100% complete it in 2 hours. Unless you really want to unlock other characters with fake accents.
