The Bottom of the Barrel! Rocket Power: Team Rocket Rescue Review (PS1)

Short version: Rocket Power: Team Rocket Rescue is a PlayStation game based on the Rocket Power cartoon, with snowboarding, rollerblading, BMX and skateboarding events. It’s the last PS1 skateboarding game on the channel, and the most broken. There’s no restart, the controls barely work and the skateboarding is full of glitches. Avoid it.

Today, I review my last PlayStation skateboarding game: Rocket Power. I’ve played through a lot of crap for this channel, and this is one of the worst. It’s probably the most broken game I’ve played for the channel. But I’m so close to being done that I’m still pretty happy to get into it. Let’s get started.

The cartoon

Rocket Power was a cartoon that came out a little bit after my time. I saw a few episodes when it was running. It’s about a group of kids that do everything: skateboard, rollerblades, snowboards, whatever. All I remember was an episode where there was a kid trying to do a 900, and according to the statistical analysis, they decided that it must be impossible. But the kid kept trying it, and by chance, he got hit with a tennis ball that shot out of a lawnmower and that gave him the extra speed. And then they had to argue about it. So that’s the best overview of the type of stuff on the show that I know about.

But we have to get into the game. As far as I know, I’ve now played every skateboarding game on the original PlayStation, and I’ve reviewed at least one per series. This is the last piece. Soon, I’m going to do a lookback on the whole system, but for now, let’s get this turd out of the way.

The story

There’s a mild story here. The local skate shop is going out of business, so it’s your job to win every competition in the area with them as your sponsor to help draw in business. Which is all the story you need, really.

Imagine if you took the team that made Goofy Skateboarding, one of my least favorite games, and had them make a game with skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, and rollerblading. Stretch them so thin that they don’t have time to finish anything. That’s basically what we’ve got here. There’s such a lack of polish that this game is tough to play.

Snowboarding, and no restart

You start with a snowboard event. Ride through the gates and get to the end. That’s it. Well, I didn’t see one of the gates on my first time, and I ran into one of the biggest and worst design choices in the game: there’s no restart.

Imagine if you couldn’t pause and restart in a Tony Hawk game. It’s unbelievable. So you lose, hit a load screen, look at a menu, load, then start the event again, and load again. Unless you do everything first try, this is going to be torture.

Rollerblading: the bike parts hunt

Speaking of torture, next is rollerblading. This was my first inkling at the pain that makes up this game. My challenge here is to find parts of my bike for the next challenge. It’s timed, and you have to make your way around and pick stuff up. And it’s just plain broken. You ride around at 2 miles an hour, and the turning is some of the worst I’ve ever seen. Just getting from A to B is like playing QWOP with a Rock Band controller.

So you’re given this level, which is way too big to explore at the speed you go, and you try to find stuff. I found a couple of the pieces pretty easily, and then guess what? Time’s up. Back to the loading screen, then the menu, then loading, then the game again. And I did this probably 30 times. No joke. I could not find all this crap.

Eventually I got to a point where I could get the first few items, but I could never reach one of them. No matter how much speed I got, I couldn’t get enough air. There are even these little icons that give you a speed boost, but none are lined up right to actually help with that.

So I figured I would try to go around on the roofs and maybe get an angle at it from there. And I was able to get over that way and find another part, but no luck with the quarter pipe. Oh, time’s up again.

After probably 45 minutes of trying, I just so happened to get enough air and grab it. What did I do different? Nothing. It just somehow worked. But I didn’t have enough time to get the rest. So I kept trying and trying, and eventually I managed to get everything.

At this point, I was pretty much done with the game. It just simply doesn’t work. It has no redeeming qualities at all. But I hadn’t reached the skateboarding yet. I still had to beat the BMX.

BMX

Luckily, this part was pretty easy. They give you a dirt course and a score to reach. The controls are really weird. R1 and L1 are spin, R2 and L2 are flips. You can theoretically do them together to do spinning flips. This will work on your bike, but not a skateboard. We’ll talk about that in a second. Face buttons will do some different tricks.

With no regard for the course layout or anything, you can just keep doing a few tricks, and collect some timer icons and beat it. I was shocked that I beat it first try because the last event was so miserable.

Skateboarding

And finally, we get to skateboarding. This is a real, published game that was available in stores. And it has more bugs than the first ever preview build of Session. Actually, probably more than it had in its first ever build.

I don’t even know where to start. How about the grinds? These don’t really do anything. You get a few points, but they don’t seem to add up in your combo at all. They’re not worth doing for any reason, and they’ll instantly take all of your speed. I feel like I’m grinding on pure rust when I try them.

The best way to get points is in the ramps. And that’s all I’m supposed to be doing here. Remember how you can do flips and spins on your bike? Well, you sort of can here, but it glitches out, and this actually happens pretty often. And when there isn’t an obvious glitch, the trick is still usually not even landable. It’s like you can do three quarters of a flip and then you stop. So you’re racking up some big totals here, but not actually making progress because you can’t roll away. The score requirement here is stupidly high: 50,000 points.

As much as I tried, I couldn’t get to that number, and it’s because none of the tricks really work. The game pretty much demands that you land everything sideways and bail. And you have to hear the kid scream in pain every time.

Flips, spins and landing sideways

Let’s say you want to do a flip. Roll up a ramp straight, hold R1, and what happens? You land sideways. It’s like your character is doing a frontside air, but stops spinning as soon as the flip starts. You just can’t do one without carefully spinning a little at the last second.

But even spinning is basically impossible. If you spin until you’re straight and let go, you always do a little bit extra and land sideways. It feels like you snap to being sideways and have to make a ton of effort to roll away from anything.

After a lot of practice, and a lot of luck, you might be able to land some tricks. That’s when you’ll notice that landing fakie robs you of most of your speed. Why would they do that? Why make your character have to turn around? Is it too much work to mirror all the animations and have switch available? You don’t even have to make it a thing and give it more points or anything. Just don’t penalize me for doing a 720 to fakie.

Anyway, after a couple of dozen tries and probably a hundred loading screens, I got really lucky. I glitched out and got stuck in the air, so I did a bunch of tricks until I passed 50,000. I didn’t want to get too greedy, so as soon as I passed it comfortably, I tried to maneuver around a little until I landed it. And it worked! Finally!

So that’s skateboarding. The next event is… Wait, what? I needed 143,000 points?! Why wouldn’t they tell me that!?

Is it worth playing?

So that’s all I had in me for this game. It’s absolutely horrible. I’ve never played a game that was so broken and glitchy. And also difficult. There is nothing in this game to enjoy whatsoever. Do everyone a favor: buy up every copy of this game you run across and destroy them. Hack websites that have ROMs of it and delete it.