Skydive by Robin Kester Electronic Arts, known for their games for the PC and Mac, recently released the second of their low-price games... Skydive!, created by Groove Alliance. The basic premise of the game is to skydive, do tricks, and land safely. Depending on the type of game you chose, you will either freefall for points, try your hand at a aerial slalom, or go for a perfect landing inside of a targeted area for accuracy. Sound like fun? Well, it isn’t. This game goes wrong in so many places that it makes you wonder how Groove Alliance could not see how poor it really is. The engine, if you will, is just a Macromedia Director projector. Don’t get me wrong... there is nothing wrong with that, some great games use this very engine. It just doesn't suit Skydive!’s style of game. The games graphics are pitiful as well. While the interface is not bad looking, the game itself again falls flat on its face. The ground terrains are grainy and pixilated and the 2 characters are plainly 3D rendered. I’d have to say that for the most part, this game could have been released as a freeware or cheap shareware title and maybe caught a few people’s interest. Sadly however, it wasn’t. Even more sadly, most shareware is way above the par this title sets. The control itself is not the greatest either. You have so few things you can actually do while you are skydiving that you never really feel like you are into the game. Just watching something happening before you that you know does nothing for you. Gameplay When you fire the game up, you are treated to some grainy, albeit cool skydiving footage. This features assorted skydivers pulling off some cool moves. Cool moves you can’t actually do in the game itself of course. Now you will find yourself at the main menu. From the here, you can set your options or play a game. Choosing Play brings you to the Events menu. From here, your character out of two characters. You also choose the location of your jump and the style of jump you wish to make, be it Freefall, Accuracy or Aerial Slalom. Each of these modes offers the player a different kind of skydiving action depending on their tastes. Freefall is just that. You make your jump and freefall, performing a handful of tricks with the mouse and keyboard before reaching the point where you must pull the chute. Then if you land successfully, you will rack up your total for that round. Accuracy pits you against gravity and a large target on the ground. The mission, find the target and reach it safely to score points. Aerial slalom is really the only challenging mode of gameplay in this game, and it earns that distinction due to the somewhat flaky controls. Your mission is to dive through floating markers in the sky, each offering you a point amount based on their visual value. 100, 200, 500, etc. Once you have flown through as many as you can brave, you then deploy your chute and land to rack up the points. There are six jump zones available including Groom Lake, Bermuda, Normandy, Stonehenge, Moscow and Seoul. To visually distinguish between them, the terrain changes appropriately and occasionally a few tall buildings hinder your way, like in the case of Moscow. Otherwise, they are all average – nothing really makes any one location stand out. While airborne, you can perform a handful of tricks including somersaults, spins and vertical drops. These are performed with ease, since all that is required of the player is moving the mouse around and clicking the button while occasionally pressing Control. To deploy your chute, watch your gauge and hit the spacebar. From that point, you gently glide to the ground. Graphics The highlight of the game is the live jump footage supplied by Aerial Focus. This shows video of single and multiple jumpers doing some interesting aerial acrobatics. Unfortunately the compression scheme used to compress the video is sub par, and as a result the movies are all extremely blocky, hearkening back to the old days when a 2x or 4x CD-ROM was all most folks had. With the high-end systems available to most players, it makes you wonder why they used such a lossy compression format. The interface graphics are not too bad. They do their job well and are pretty much uncluttered. But, do to the fact that there is not much content to show, they tend to end up uncluttered anyway. The actual gameplay graphics are poor. The player’s character is 3D rendered and has a few frames of animation, but ends up looking like a lifeless form with pixilated edges as you play. Also suffering from this graphical plague are the ground textures. While they don't look too bad right when you jump from the plane, they get pixilated horribly as your descent brings you closer to them. Luckily the targets are higher resolution and can be easily distinguished from the rest of the terrain or they would be almost impossible to hit. Sound The sound in feels flat. There are a nice selection of tunes to jump to, but as you are falling, you can’t help but wonder why you don’t get a real feeling of energy like you should – the music should pump you up and keep you there. Instead it leaves you feeling like you should have picked another song. As you jump, you can hear the air rushing past you, but it doesn’t really convey a feeling of speed. In real life the sound is almost deafening, and adds greatly to the experience as you rush to the ground at 32 feet per second. The sound just doesn’t quite rescue the game where it falls short in other areas though. Overall Skydiving fans don’t hold your breath, because this game is not going to satisfy any of your urges to jump and freefall from anything. Not only would the real thing be more fun, I could think of hundreds of things that would be more fun. With lousy gameplay combined with sub par graphics and average sound, Skydive! falls flat on its face. It looks like the guys at Groove Alliance forgot to open their chute on this one. To be honest, I can’t think of a gaming experience that I have had in quite a while that was as unsatisfying as Skydive!. Pros • Simple to use controls • Inexpensive price • Interesting video clips of real skydiving stunts Cons • Graphically uninspired • Engine (Director) not suited for this style of game • Limited tricks and landing zones make for limited play • Feels like a sub-par shareware title