Backyard Skateboarding

The Good
The Backyard Sports series is a series that had first started out in 1997 by the company called Humongous Entertainment, and it was a series that had you playing as kids in five different sports. Baseball, Soccer, Football, Basketball and Hockey. Come around the time of 2004 when Humongous Entertainment was owned by Atari for a year or two and decided that they wanted to do something a little bit unique. Hence, Backyard Skateboarding was released for the PC.

They had a pretty unique thing going to put in a little variety to the usual lineup of the franchise, but that doesn't always mean that it would be fantastic. The things that were good about it is that while there are a lack of levels to choose from, there are at least some variety to them by using themes and challenges that may vary in difficulty for the young player. There are also some tricks that are unique to some characters that are pretty difficult to pull off, not to mention some of the power-ups in the game that may or may not help out the player while skating.

The Bad
Sadly, everything else seems to be really lacking.

The one thing that people who play the games before this is that only about a dozen of the backyard characters can be played in this game, it may not ruin the the game, but it may cause some people to scratch their heads. It wouldn't be a huge concern as long as the gameplay and story was good enough... wait, did I just say a story was behind this?

Yes indeed, unlike the others, there is actually a story behind this one. The backyard kids are tired of the skate-park that they have until our only pro skater that can be played in this game, Andy McDonald, convinces the other kids to the on challenges in various locations. After enough challenges are completed and the bosses are defeated, the ultimate skate park called Skate Station Alpha would be created. This is just about as much fun getting to the skate park then the actual challenges to get there, it isn't. I did say earlier that challenges varied in difficulty in the Rookie, Pro and Boss challenges, but they are either not challenging enough or could just a little bit challenging but still not fun for a young kid. The voice acting is also very repetitive, and you might want to find the option to turn it off as soon as possible, but that is not all there is to it... the biggest annoyance in my opinion would be the fact that this game has quite a few glitches, and it is also hilarious due to the fact that there are 600 coins scattered all throughout the levels, but some of them you have to time just right and get lucky, or you use the faults in the game to you advantage.... quality assurance testing be darned, there needs to be sure that any game doesn't have any faults... or it makes the experience not as fun for those who want to beat the game.

The Bottom Line
If there is one way to describe the game, it would be that it was rushed and a very tedious game to play. Luckily the tediousness would only be three or four hours long, but it might be just as well to get something better for the kids then a watered down version of a Tony Hawk game. Trust me, it's not worth it.