It's Skate or Die on Game Boy… Works?
With this week's video chronicles installment, we begin our transition from the wild west frontier days of similarly inspired but dissimilarly treated video projects to the grand unifying vision of… WORKS. In case you missed my explanation last week (and clearly quite people did, if YouTube comments are anything to go by), here's the deal: As part of the general movement of Retronauts into something respectable (nay, viable), we're rebranding these video projects and their accompanying books from the hodgepodge of "Good Nintentions," "Game Boy World," "Mode Seven" and so on to a single multi-facet venture: Works. Game Boy Works, NES Works, etc. It has no impact on the content of these videos, just the intro/outro, the title typography, and the naming.
See? Ultimately, it's business as usual.
I have to say, though, Skate or Die: Bad ’N Rad was not at all what I was expecting. I fiddled around with the original Skate or Die as a kid and expected more of the same: A sort of freeform skateboard simulator. This was not the case at all. Rather than presenting a portable adaptation of Electronic Arts' popular skating game, Konami created something entirely new from the ground up, with the only real connection between the two being the top-down stages (which bear a loose resemblance to the stage select portion of EA's game — but even then, the stage select in Skate or Die used absolute "tank" controls whereas the top-down portions here use relative inputs).
It's a strange creative choice, to be honest. Surely there would have been less work involved in, and more money to be gleaned from, a faithful adaptation? And yet, here's this. There's a vague, hard-to-pin-down element of New Orleans aesthetic here that makes this feel like some bizarre hybrid of skateboard and The Adventures of Bayou Billy, and it makes me wonder whether Konami already had a kooky skateboarding platformer in the works and decided to take take advantage of the Skate or Die license by slapping it on an unrelated game? But then again, they held the Skate or Die licensed for a couple of years before Bad ’N Rad arrived, and the development on this game couldn't possibly have taken more than nine or 10 months to complete. So, man, I don't know what the story is here. I just know it's a strange and interesting game, and I wish it had turned out better than it ultimately did.
