Thursday, February 19, 2009

Down the glass

I've been spending a fair bit of time in Skate 2 just looking around for interesting lines and spots to create. Yesterday I found a create-a-spot that someone had made on top of one of the seaside buildings. I'd seen that spot before as it's used for a hall of meat challenge in freeskate, but I have no idea how they got up there in normal mode. I had previously looked with envious eyes at the balconies around the building and wished there was a way up onto them, but now I could drop down from the top to skate a fair distance to the adjoining buildings.

Filled with new vigor to find a way onto the balconies myself, I popped back out into normal mode and tooled around looking at likely jump points or hidden features to make the climb. Finally I decided on the sloping feature walls with holes in them, but couldn't get up enough speed to make the jump over the rail. I did manage to glitch my way over by bailing on one jump and sliding through a hole in the balcony to respawn on the right side. I'm in!

From level 1 there was a staircase up to small level 2 balcony that was divided from the rest by about a 5m gap. I tried jumping it and also the bailing technique that got me up the first stage, but kept missing the mark. There was a sloping deck chair on level 1, but after 1/2 hour of pushing, wedging, flipping & resetting it I gav up trying to push it up the stairs.

Skating around a bit more I found that you could make a jump to the sails from the level 1 balcony, so I made a create-a-spot from there with a fairly tough landing onto the ground. Looking back up the sail though and it starts just above the 2nd level balcony, so I managed to work my way up the sail and over onto the balcony. Sweet!

After some more cruising and looking for potential spots, I found exactly what I was after: 3 glass ovals in procession heading down to the lily pond. Moving a deck chair into position it made the perfect spot with a launch to the first, a quick hop to the second and an even quicker hop to the 3rd before gliding to the ground. The create-a-spot criteria really only covers one trick, but hopefully you can transition the 4 gaps and land a huge score.

After setting up the spot I tried it out in normal mode and managed to complete the sequence with simple ollies so it definitely is possible to do. Now I just have to work on my manuals to link them all together.