Disney Sports Skateboarding

The Disney Sports gang take to the streets!

JP release: 19th September 2002
NA release: 17th November 2002
EU release: 3rd March 2003
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
NGC Magazine Score: 64%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

Another in the GameCube-exclusive Disney Sports series. This time, Konami are taking on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as Mickey Mouse and the gang take on skateboarding. The character selection is still slim pickings (not even Daisy Duck makes it this time), but at the very least they included the one character that would enjoy skateboarding: Goofy’s son, Max.

The game starts off surprisingly difficult. You get throw into a level with a time limit and some objectives: two high scores, a large combo, collect all 576 gems in the levels and smash 10 objects hidden in the level. However, there’s a main objective the game doesn’t tell you: a time trial. Instead of being able to free room, there are five checkpoints and you have to find them and reach the end before the time runs out, racking up enough points to get a high enough ranking to get to the next level. Even though there’s a red line showing the route, it can still be rather difficult to follow.

And then the controls bring another issue. Doing tricks feels very delayed, to the point that it feels like the game hasn’t recognised your input, so you input it again. This then causes both to be “queued up”, likely resulting in you falling. Grinding, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. There’s no balance meter, so you can grind endlessly. Momentum “pauses” when you grind, so the speed you are during the jump will remain for the entire grind, even going uphill.

The second stage is an extremely long half tube. You can grind along the edge, jump repeatedly and score double of the highest possible ramp in a very short space of time. Oddly, combining grinds doesn’t count as a combo in all levels, but there’s another broken method to score points. As you perform tricks, your special move meter goes up. Tap Z twice when you’re on the ground and you’ll do a boost or large jump and score a few thousand points. The way the meter fills is strange: it’s goes up a set amount for each “combo”, so stringing together 20 moves will fill it up as much as doing a single flip from a jump on the ground. A few basic separate flips will fill the bar really quickly. You don’t even have to worry about landing the move, as it still fills up if you fall.

So you have levels that you’re not really allowed to explore, needing high scores and get to all the checkpoints mean that you don’t really care about the other objectives, especially with how ridiculous the task of collecting 576 gems in each level is. It also doesn’t feel nice to play and is overall a poor experience.

Poor

One of the greatest mysteries of out time must be how the likes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and – worst of all – Goofy ever became popular enough to make it to cartoons, let alone their own games. But they did, and they have, in this latest outing for the ‘comedy’ threesome, a decent-ish take on the superior Tony Hawk’s series.
Tim Weaver, NGC Magazine #80

Remake or remaster?

Perhaps in a collection of Mickey Mouse games.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get Disney Sports Skateboarding.