January 24, 2003 - Konami hasn't exactly had a whole lot of success in the skateboarding genre, on any system. On the Game Boy Advance, the company was previously responsible for the rather lame ESPN X Games Skateboarding that just couldn't come close to matching what had already been done in Activision's own Tony Hawk series. But even when Konami alters its direction more towards the established Hawk GBA brand, it fails even more. Disney Sports Skateboarding is just a bad attempt at a portable skateboarding game, and it's even worse when you realize that this game's focus is the younger gaming crowd.

Features

• Four selectable characters
• Eight skateparks
• Cartridge save (one slot)
• Only for Game Boy Advance

Special moves can only be pulled off if they're earned by collecting icons throughout the skateparks. But even if they're in the players' library of moves, they're nearly impossible to pull off because A) the commands are so damn complex, using a combination of buttons and directions on the D-pad that are far from intuitive; and B) the game doesn't register these combos every time, even if they were entered in correctly. And even when players do pull off these moves, the animations are just so crappy that the payoff just isn't there.

See, there's a reason why development companies like Vicarious Visions and Full Fat worked a polygonal character engine for their isometric extreme sports games: there's just way too many frames of animation to deal with. If anything Disney Sports Skateboarding proves this point extremely well, because the animation of each of the characters is simply pathetic. The development team had to render all four characters in eight different positions, giving them a series of moves at each of these angles. And when you're working with the limited cartridge space and VRAM of the GBA system, you're not going to get very far...and in this case the flow of each character's moves is, for lack of a better word, chunky. Good luck telling the visual difference between a "popcorn" and a "rolling barrel," the only two standard moves each of the characters have in their list. What's worse is that the game is plagued in slowdown for no apparent reason. It just shows just how sloppily the development team treated this project.

Closing Comments
There are three other gameplay modes on top of the standard "Trick Attack" option, but since they all revolve around the same game engine, there's nothing rewarding about playing these modes. Disney Sports Skateboarding is just an awful game all the way through.

Rating	Description
out of 10	click here for ratings guide
4.0	Presentation Four gameplay modes to choose from, but the game's frontend doesn't give players any idea of what's expected...even the manual's descriptions are terrible
3.0	Graphics Clunky animation and tons of slowdown plague this Konami production. It's just miles away from what other extreme sports developers have done on the GBA...in the other direction.
7.0	Sound The music's decent, but there's not a single Disney character soundbite found anywhere in the game.
2.0	Gameplay The clunky animation really hurts the control, as does the icky command structure for special moves.
5.0	Lasting Appeal There's a decent amount of skateparks, but not a whole lot of extras to acquire. There's no multiplayer mode, either.
3.0 Bad	OVERALL (out of 10 / not an average)