720 Degrees

"Short lived fun"

Remember the nice looking skateboarding game in the arcades a decade ago? Well that game made it onto the nes, scaled down in terms of graphics, sounds and gameplay. What’s left? Actually quite a pleasant, if short lived, little game!

The proof that a game is ‘fun’ is if it’s still fun when downscaled. 720 is fun. The hat wearing character is now rather blocky with facial features reduced to a smile and two pixel eyes, but he can still do nifty jumps, twists and stunts. Control is simple enough. The limited graphics represent game items well enough, in isometric fashion.

You basically have to skate around some streets buying various extras and earning money doing the stunts. These involve a slalom, a skiing type jump, the u-shaped bowl and a downhill course. Hazards come in the shape of some rather odd street denizens who can knock you off your board and water, into which you can plunge. Running out of time is your main concern. Hang around doing jumps in the street will see your time fall too quickly, it would be nice to just mess around some more. If you do get out of time then you’re chased by some dots-cum-skull thingy after being challenged to ‘skate or die’

The levels in 720 are classes, you ascend classes by doing sufficiently well in the stunt arenas and you need to buy extra gear to pull off the best stunts. This is where the drawbacks come in. The game is simple, sure, and the graphics and sound are pretty limited which doesn’t bother me, but the game play begs you to experiment, whilst the time factor demands that you do the stunts and move on.

In later classes there are some extra features on the map, more opportunities to lark around jumping over water and so on. If you steal a few seconds between arenas you can also try jumping over the car or the skeleton guy. Once I even jumped over the dots-cum-skull thingy, although that may have been buggy.

A free-wheeling option to practice would have been fun. We’re not dropping coins here, coin-up conversions can be too literal sometimes.

Over all 720 is a good effort at downscaling a more advanced game and leaving the fun relatively intact. It falls short in the long run though because it’s too linear. Even if you’re quite good at 720 you get bored of rushing round the same map, doing the necessary stunts and moving on.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/09/01, Updated 05/09/01