Skater Reviews - Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure. Lost Tony Hawk Game?
Short version: Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure came out in September 2003 on PS2 and Xbox. It was made by Toys for Bob and is basically a reskin of Tony Hawk 4 with Toy Story, Lion King and Tarzan worlds. The Toy Story levels are great, the rest get tedious, and the product placement is ridiculous, but it works and it’s probably the best kids’ skateboarding game there is.
So I’ve been reviewing all of the Tony Hawk games, which means that I have to take a look at Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure on the PS2 and Xbox. How does this relate to Tony Hawk, and is it any good? Let’s take a look.
A Tony Hawk 4 reskin
We have to take a small detour from the Tony Hawk games and talk about Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure… and that’s because this game is actually just a reskin of Tony Hawk 4. I didn’t know about that until I played THUG Pro, which is a mod that lets you play all the PS2-era levels in one game. In there, you get these Disney levels, and you can skate around in Andy’s room from Toy Story. So clearly there’s some kind of connection.
So what’s the story behind this game? Well, it came out in September 2003, almost a year after Tony Hawk 4 and a month or two behind Underground, depending on the platform. It was developed by Toys for Bob, who you might remember as the guys behind Downhill Jam on the Wii a couple of years later. I reviewed that one already, before I started doing them in order. This is their first skateboarding game, but not their first Disney game, because they made the gem that is 102 Dalmatians a couple of years prior.
So they’re not exactly a triple A developer, but they’re starting with a really solid engine… Let’s see if they were able to make something out of it.
Controls and challenges
The gameplay looks and feels a lot like what you’d expect, but do yourself a favor: turn pro controls on as soon as you can. This will make the game control like Tony Hawk. With it off, a lot of the controls are context-based, and they don’t even make sense. I couldn’t figure out how to do a manual on purpose, even though it would happen sometimes on its own.
The flow of the gameplay is just like Tony 4: skate around until you find someone to give you a challenge. Now, one of my biggest complaints with the main game was the acting and the pointless story stuff. That’s still here… but it’s in a Disney world with characters that have personality. So it’s not nearly as bad. The army men want you to do challenges and overcome obstacles, basic training style.
The green alien guys are trying to do things in service to the claw.
And the high scores are a way to challenge Scar in the Lion King.
So I think the acting actually kind of works here. It gets you more into the story, and lets you feel like the skateboarding stuff actually fits into the world.
But as for the stuff you do, it’s just straight up Tony Hawk. Get high scores and collect skate letters. There’s even stuff ripped directly from the game. In Alcatraz, you have to skitch to clear a gap and then get a certain height and a certain distance. In the last Toy Story level, you do the exact same thing with a spaceship.
Collectibles
But there are two things that this game does significantly differently. First is the collectibles. Each character has a certain item you have to collect to finish the challenge. Woody has badges, Timon and Pumbaa have tasty grubs, Tarzan has spearheads. That means that every character has to play every level if you want to 100% complete the game. I tried to do this, but it really sucks after the first playthrough. I got everything with Woody, but trying to get them all as Buzz Lightyear is a pain because you aren’t exploring the level doing challenges anymore. You’re just looking for stuff, and it’s really tedious. When you get them all in a level, you unlock a special trick.
Boss fights
But the other thing they added is boss fights.
So here’s how the game works. There are 3 worlds: Toy Story, Lion King and Tarzan. Each has 3 unique levels that you can only play with characters from that world. There are certain challenges in each story that can only be done by certain characters, though. In the Toy Story world, only Buzz Lightyear can fight the boss, Emperor Zurg. He does this by doing a loop, which makes some platforms pop up. Then you have to grab a thing that powers down part of Zurg’s platform. Get them all and he falls. Then you can play as him and do his unique challenge too.
But don’t expect this to be hard. The game is for kids. You can breeze through the whole thing in a couple of hours if you don’t bother with the collecting stuff.
A smaller trick list
Another way they simplified the game for kids is by cutting the trick selection way down. There are no nollies, no no complies or bonelesses. You can’t do wallrides either. There’s only one manual per character, 2 flip tricks, 4 grabs and a couple of specials.
The reason for this is because each character has unique stuff. Everyone has kickflips, but they had to be re-animated for all the different body types and boards. Then there’s one advanced flip trick. Woody drops tre flips, Timon and Pumbaa do a shove-it, and on and on. The grinds are all unique too, like Tarzan’s “Hot Foot.” So, sure, there are fewer tricks per character, but probably only because it was so much work making the ones that are in the game.
The human kids have some real-ish tricks, but we’ll get to them in a minute. And you’ll want to hang in for that, because it gets really weird.
But the limited tricks have a big effect on the way you play the game. Collecting the special Toy Story logo in every level can take some strategizing, since you can’t pull the old wallride to grind to wallride to grind trick to climb buildings. You can still do spine transfers and reverts, but the high scores are so easy that there isn’t much of a need for it, and there aren’t even any spines in the game anyway.
Toy Story is the only good world
Most of the footage in my video is from the Toy Story levels, and there’s a reason for that. They’re the only good ones. Grinding on the stuff in Andy’s room and skating the kitchen and the arcade are pretty cool. There are quarter pipes and rails and all kinds of normal stuff, just done in a Toy Story theme.
But the other levels are all rocks and sticks and logs, and it’s harder to tell what everything is supposed to be. Is this a quarter pipe or what? The elephant graveyard in the Lion King levels is so dark that it’s hard to see, and you’ll run into all kinds of weird, unrecognizable stuff. Plus you can drop to your death if you go the wrong way. I feel like these levels would work well in a platform game, like Spyro or Mario, but they aren’t the best skating levels.
Olliewood and the human skaters
But there is one more level, Olliewood, only accessible by humans. This level has some challenges itself, but it also acts as a hub world so you can skate in the other worlds too. The kid has some pretty fresh tricks, though, like hurricanes and bluntslides. He can also do a weird late frontside 360 shove-it. Of course, they don’t use the real names for any of this stuff, for whatever reason. Maybe “blunt” and “shove it” are potentially offensive for Disney audiences. And with this being a human-shaped character, mostly, why not use all the tricks from Tony Hawk? This kid should be throwing nollie hards and overcrooks all over this town. He’s got caspers locked, though! That’s pretty cool.
McDonald’s and Nokia
So you do all the basic challenges here, like getting a high score and collecting SKATE. You also find bottles of pop for a thirsty dude in the grocery store. But then you run into this weird challenge.
They must not have had very much confidence in this game, because it has the most blatant product placement I’ve ever seen in a video game. The local friendly McDonald’s wants to help out their regulars and deliver their food to them, since they’re too busy to come in like they always do. I mean, everyone loves McDonald’s, so the whole town goes there every day. For each delivery, they show a carefully rendered model of the food, and then the person you deliver it to is just so excited to get it. There’s a McDonald’s cameo in Tony Hawk’s Underground, which came out a couple of months after this, but it’s not nearly so bad.
But it’s not just McDonald’s! The Nokia one is much, much worse. This dude just got his sweet new Nokia phone that can play amazing ringtones! Everyone in the town just got the same phone, so he wants you to go listen to their ringtones. You have to go around and find everyone, including an old man and a weird pirate fisherman guy, who just so happen to be up on the latest technology, and you have to sit through listening to their ringtone. It’s unskippable. You can skip most of the dialogue in the game, but this paid-for ringtone ad? Nope. Looking back on this, it’s completely ridiculous that they would brag about these crappy ringtones. And they didn’t even play nice versions of the melodies. They actually made them sound like they were coming out of crappy early 2000s cellphones. Worse yet, when you get them all, the whole town gathers together and has a dance party to the amazing music coming from their Nokias. Again, this is unskippable, and stupidly long.
Wow. I played this level last, and there’s nothing like that in the Disney worlds, for obvious reasons. You can’t really shoehorn a Nokia ad into the Lion King universe.
Is it worth playing today?
So what’s the verdict on this game? Is it any good?
You know, for the first hour or so when I was playing through the Toy Story stuff, I thought it was great. Maybe even better than Tony Hawk 4, despite being so simple and easy. But the further I got into it, the more annoying it was. The bad level design in the Tarzan and Lion King worlds was frustrating, and seeing the same two tricks over and over and over was tedious.
But it could have been a lot worse. There’s another Disney skateboarding game, called Goofy Skateboarding. It’s… garbage. It’s like a free CD-ROM game that would come with your AOL trial disc in 1998. It’s horrible! The controls barely work, the graphics are… You know what, I can’t do this right now. I did eventually review it, and it went about how you’d expect. Beautiful, sunny day, vacation time from work, cold drink in my hand, super relaxed. Then I might be able to play it for more than a minute without wanting to punch through my computer.
But the point is, Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure is much better than that. It actually works. I only had one real issue with getting stuck in something. Aside from that, it plays well. The challenges make sense and are functional. For a kids’ skateboarding game, you could do a lot worse, and this is probably the best one there is. I wouldn’t run out and buy it, but if you have kids or something, it might not be a bad way to go if you see it for a couple of bucks.
