The Closeout Warrior

Skate or Die! is both a mantra to live by and a short-lived video game series. For a time in the 1980s you could hardly walk a couple of blocks without falling over some guys with skateboards. Seemingly realizing this, Electronic Arts cashed in and developed a ‘meta-game’ with several mini-events based on skateboarding. You get to do these events in whatever order you like or you can do them all in a kind of Skateboarding Olympics.

Most of the events are for one player at a time, where you compete for some kind of high score. In the High Jump you mash the A and B buttons to try and jump as high as you can on a half-pipe. Pretty lame, especially if you used a turbo controller like I did.

In Freestyle, you took the same half-pipe and the same ‘mash A and B to gain speed’ control scheme, but this time you added the ability to waggle the control pad and mash the A and B buttons to try and to some tricks. You do more tricks, you get more points. You only get 10 passes on the ramp, so you need to chain together as many ‘things’ as you can without crashing in a hilariously horrible way.

Jam allows you to race down a hill covered with rad-to-the-max obstacles and two (yes, two!) paths you could take: one path is shorter, but much tougher to navigate, yielding more points and a potentially faster time. I would invariably end up falling flat on my face too many times and then purposely make my skater crash into the water just off the conveniently-place dock.

Now we move on to the two-player head-to-head events. Both of them.

First is the Race. This takes place in some seedy back alley. You get to race against Lester, the son of the proprietor of the local skate shop (and former marine) to the end of the very short alley, with a path that branches in an attempt to get to the end of the race faster, but ultimately to score more points. You score points by doing very simple tricks and smashing the trash that’s scattered around the alley (you get crazy bonus points for jumping on the squad car at the end of the alley). You also have the option of punch your opponent to sabotage his run while he does the same to you. This mode is great, but is way too short.

Then there’s the Pool Joust. I don’t really like the Pool Joust. In Pool Joust, you and another skater (my favorite is Poseur Pete) skate around an empty cement pond, and one of you has a ‘bopper’ (it looks kind of like a giant cotton swab). Your goal is to use the bopper to knock the other person off of their board. After every five passes, the bopper switches between you and your opponent. You knock your opponent off his board the requisite number of times and you win.

So, yes, it’s a party game, kind of like Caveman Games only with kids on skateboards instead of cave people, and not quite so bizarre.

One of the styles of games that has kind of gone away in recent years is the sports competition game. These games provide some series of mini games or ‘events’ tied together by some theme. One of the more unusual of these was Caveman Games.

Caveman Games focused on a group of Cave-people, including the token female, Crudla, and the nerd wearing glasses, Vincent, participating in the ‘Ugh-lympics’, a series of events with a caveman theme. You get to participate in: Fire Making, Clubbing, Dino-Vaulting, Dino-Racing, Saber Tooth Tiger Outrunning, and the Mate Toss.

Most events are the ‘mash one button faster than the other person’ variety. Fire-making, for example, has you and one other person mashing the ‘rub two sticks together’ button as fast as possible while you strategically use the ‘bonk the other person over the head’ button and the ‘blow on the embers/duck/make yourself dizzy with asphyxiation’ button.

The Mate Toss is a slightly different affair, you grab your mate by the ankles, rotate your control pad as evenly and as quickly as you can, then you press and hold the ‘angle’ button until the desired angle is reached and then release it, letting your mate fly. The goal here being, of course, to throw your mate for as many ‘foots’ at possible. Toss your mate far enough and she’ll do a ridiculous little dance. Interestingly, in the NES version of the game, the female competitor tosses a female ‘mate’, likely because of limitations of the NES hardware, but in the Commodore 64 version she reportedly tosses a male. I haven’t actually ever played the C64 version, so I can’t verify that.

Clubbing is probably the most complicated event in this compilation. You and your opponent stand on a giant flat rock and smash each other about the face and shins with your clubs in addition to using devious tactics (distracting with a point and a ‘Look over there!’ expression on your face) in attempt to make them back up and eventually fall off the rock.

The other events were pretty lame, the Dino-race has you and an opponent mashing the ‘make the dino go faster’ button while strategically pressing the ‘avoid obstacles’ button, the Saber Race has you mashing the ‘make delicious caveman run faster than saber-soothed cat button’ while strategically pressing the ‘throw your opponent behind you’ button, and the Dino-vault has you mashing the ‘make the caveman run faster’ button and strategically pressing and releasing the ‘plant and release the pole vault’ button.

There’s a little bit of pseudo-caveman speak in this game. Distances are measured in ‘foots’, countdowns to event starts go, “3, 2, 1, Ugh!”, and of course the above-mentioned ‘Ugh-lympics’. For some reason I found it incredibly annoying back when I played this game the first time around, and now just find it a mild nuisance.

Caveman Games is one of those games that you can break out when you have a bunch of people around who are clamoring to play some kind of NES game if you don’t have something better around.