Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater brought the skateboarding game genre mainstream in the late ’90s, but skating games have been around for far longer than that. I have fond memories of shredding it up in games like 720°, California Games and Skate or Die. In fact Skate or Die 2 on the NES is one of my all-time most played games, not for its wacky and way-too-difficult side-scrolling adventure mode, but for its amazingly fun “Double Trouble" halfpipe skating mode. That mode really captured the essence of gaining speed and pulling off tricks on a vert ramp, and it felt amazing.
A couple of decades later I got that feeling again when I discovered the excellent Pocket HalfPipe ($1.99) which, while simplified, really nailed the feeling of gaining massive speed on a ramp and pulling off tricks high above the coping. (It also received a long overdue update this past January bringing it up to snuff for modern devices, so check it out!) Anyway, this is all just a long-winded way of me telling you that there’s a new halfpipe skating game coming out that I’m pretty excited about called Halfpipe Hero. The premise of the game is that you’re skating and pulling off tricks to earn cash, which you can use to unlock new skaters and backgrounds. Also, the better you skate the more fans you’ll amass, which means you’ll earn more money. Check out Halfpipe Hero in action in these animated .gifs.
While developer Bit Free Games doesn’t go into great detail about the mechanics in HalfPipe Hero, I’m pretty sure I get the gist of it from these animations. You’ll launch into the air and rotate your entire skater as many times as you can, stopping in time to line up your board and body so that you can land smoothly back in the transition of the ramp. It looks like you’ll be graded on how well you line yourself up too, and if you stop late and are over-rotated you’ll bail. Not quite a skateboarding simulation or anything, but a clever little mechanic that should work well on the touchscreen. If the game works the way I think it does, it’ll be very similar to the awesome Bouncy! Trampoline (Free), still one of my favorite one-touch time wasters.
If you think Halfpipe Hero is looking cool too, check out the forum thread for some discussion and throw your hat in the ring for some beta testing. Once more details or a release date are announced, we’ll let you know.
