RIGHT: My first
noseslide, captured
for posterity.NEED TO KNOW
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http://www.crea-turestudios.combecomes second nature is a rare
feeling—not exclusive to videogames.
Things are made more
complicated by a ‘free grind’ system.
THPS and Skate lock the player to
edges and rails marked as grindable
surfaces, meaning if you approach
the rail from just about any angle
with some amount of momentum,
you’ll snap to it and get to sliding.
In Session, edges and rails aren’t
coded as grindable surfaces because
literally every edge and rail is free
game. But as a result, the player isn’t
coded to snap to them.GRINDING IT OUT
A perfect angle of approach, speed,
and height are required to begin a
grind, and even then you need to
treat each stick as the weight pressing
down on each end of the board to
stay balanced. 50-50s, the default
grind in most skating games, require
pressure on the front and back. To
pull off a nose slide it takes a
perfectly timed ollie and 90-degree
turn, perfect spacing between the
surface, and the board to land the flat
part of the nose on the surface,
pressure on the nose-stick, and no
pressure on the tail-stick.
It’s a lot to think about for such a
simple move, and exactly why it took
me about 20 minutes to land my first
noseslide. But the feeling brushed up
against my early days of skating,
proof that persistence pays. Simple
tricks don’t just look cool, they’re
built on the back of dozens of failed
attempts. Every new trick mastered is
a major win—a victory as big as
beating any Dark Souls boss.MY FIRST HOURS OF SESSION
WERE SPENT NOODLING
AROUND IN A PARKING LOTKICKFLIPPED Changing stance alters which stick-legs
do what. Here’s a ‘simple’ kickf lip in four stancesREGULAR
L1
LRSWITCH
L2
LRFAKIE
L3
LRNOLLIE
L4
LRB
efore landing my
first kickflip, I fell on
my ass hundreds of
times. I thought the
muscle memory
would never catch up with my teen
dream to do something cool on a
wheeled piece of wood, but one
evening in the Pizza Hut parking
lot, the sun setting, snow falling, it
happened. Pop, slide, spin, slam—
I landed a kickflip.
Practice aligned with confidence, and
I did the thing as if I’d always done
the thing. A frustrating process gave
way to joy. Suddenly, I was a real
skater boy rolling around with
something like prestige, my ass
now radiating pride with the pain.
FLIPPING TRICKY
Skateboarding videogames have been
great at capturing the fantasy of
being a kickflip master, but skip out
on how to get there in the first place.
In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, you’re
what Tony Hawk dreams about at
night, a skateboard superhero pulling
off 900s and darkslides and Christ
airs with the ease of an incoming fart.
In EA’s Skate, things tip towards
realism, but waggling the analog stick
about spits out advanced flip tricks
like they’re on a factory line.
But Session, a new Early Access
skate sim from Crea-ture Studios,
treats the arduous process of learning
to skate with as much love as actually
being a skateboard pro. And it does
so with a bonkers control scheme
guaranteed to turn away—disgust,
even—the most dedicated genre fans.
Turning is assigned to the left and
right triggers—the scheme is so
distinct that it only supports
gamepad play—to simulate leaning to
shift weight from one side to the
other. It feels pretty bad at
first, but then so did wrapping
my brain around how to look and
move in a first-person shooter with
a keyboard and mouse.
The analog sticks are where
things get truly strange. Imagine a
skater in a regular stance (left foot
near the front of the board, right foot
at the back). Players manipulate the
board with analog feet, the left foot
as the left stick, and the right foot
as the right stick.
So, to perform the most essential
manoeuver, an ollie, players move the
right stick down, just as a skater
would with their right foot to pop the
tail, and swipe the left stick up to
kick the board up with the left foot.
For a kickflip, the left stick-foot
needs to hit the edge of the board, sorather than swipe up, players swipe
left. To spin the board in order to pull
off shove-its and varials, the right
stick-foot needs to scoop rather than
pop. A 360-flip takes a hard
clockwise spin of the right stick and a
leftward swipe of the left stick.
Pulling off basic tricks is difficult, but
all the more gratifying to master.
My first hours of Session are spent
in a parking lot, barely moving,
committing the basics to muscle
memory. It sounds boring, but the
way the control scheme slowlyEXTRA LIFE
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