Hoverboards Don’t Work On Water

I’m glad that Jenny announced today’s Back to the Future Nukestravaganza, because it’s allowing me to express righteous rage that I’ve been keeping locked away for far too long.

If you’re one of the millions of delusional children of the late ’80s or early ’90s, then you wanted to know when Mattel was going to release the hoverboard they were keeping all to themselves. Sure, it seemed so unbelievably futuristic at the time, but now we’re playing videogames on 10″ touch screen computers that can network over the air and watch full-length movies off of storage media no larger than your pinky fingernail.

My point is this: WHERE THE HELL IS MY HOVERBOARD YOU BASTARDS!!!

Okay, deep breath…phew.

Maybe the following collection of videogames that all feature hoverboards will help soothe your still-burning desire to float on air 4″ off the ground, strapped in with self-locking Reebok’s. Ha! Remember the Reebok Pump? They still make those.

Sonic Riders

Sure, the Sonic Riders series has comfortably hovered at the low 50s on Metacritic, but clearly most of these stuffy reviewers aren’t taking into consideration how awesome of a concept it is to put the super-fast land animal on a hoverboard and further cripple him with shitty controls and broken track designs.

Maybe the fun-loving extended cast of wisecracking foxes, a fat man and Amy Rose can save the day? Oh – I know, let’s try Kinect motion controls – nope. I suppose you could live out your Sonic and Tails furry fantasies in co-op with palm-to-palm riding. Okay, I’ll stop. God damn you, SEGA!

EyeToy: AntiGrav

It’s true, Harmonix didn’t always shit out solid gold hits like Rock Band and Dance Central.

They made an EyeToy game that was pretty innovative, but ultimately doomed on account of first-gen camera tech and a control scheme that required you to wave your arms like a lunatic and adjust the board with your face.

Kinect’s got nothing on this shit. “You are the controller.” HA! Harmonix did that back in 2004 and all they needed was your ugly-ass mug.

Try again Microsoft – you just got swerved!

Airblade

This was one of the first games I bought on eBay in a fevered anticipation of true hoverboard gameplay. I told you I was a card-carrying member of Generation Easily Duped.

However, in this case, I wasn’t soul-crushingly disappointed. See, like AntiGrav, Airblade was developed by a group of competent developers with a love for the concept (here’s a hint, they added the flying DeLorean to one of their recent racers as DLC).

Criteron Games delivered a very fun and solid game that celebrated the locomotion and novelty of flying around an urban environment fighting the man and pulling off wicked tricks, bro.

Jak and Daxter 2 and 3

Creating a Grand Theft Auto style of open world meant Naughty Dog had to figure out a natural mode of transportation for Jak that didn’t require stealing every hovercar in sight, thus the compact hoverboard was employed. Jak could whip it out at a moment’s notice, and since a lot of the missions required travel from one end of the large cityscape to the other this ended up being the ham sandwich solution to getting from point A to point B.

Jak 2 was a tough game to love, but the “jet board” helped ease the painful transition from lovable platformer to angst-ridden GTA clone, and by Jak 3 they got it mostly right. On my list of Top 10 unrealistic desires, a Naughty Dog developed Jak 4 sits comfortably between owning my own business and making a Carl’s Jr. Captain Crunch milkshake from scratch.

Urbz: Sims in the City

I worked on the console versions of Urbz: Sims in the City for six months as a temp QA Tester for EA Redwood Shores and Maxis. There are only a handful of memorable features to the Urbz, mainly the horrendously forced Black Eyed Peas marketing effort and fulfilling lot requirements for Darius, a character that looked like a pimp and functioned as the game’s equivalent of Tom Nook.

The Executive Producer was quoted as claiming over 40 hours of content in the game, but we had a couple of speed testers who could do it all in under two hours. The DS version succeeded at being its own thing with a story, features and minigames that didn’t completely suck as DS launch software. Did I mention there was a hoverboard in the portable version? Let’s move along, shall we? Memory lane is starting to stink up the place.

Final Fantasy VIII

Since this is the last game, I’m going to skip past how this is related to hoverboards. Instead, let’s talk about Final Fantasy VIII. First off, I’ve never played it. I don’t intend on playing it either. I will never play it. Sure, FFVII gets all of the attention and that makes you mad because FFVIII is the better game. Squall is a much more complex character than that douche Cloud and the whole gun blade thing totally kicks ass. I’m with you.

Can we agree that maybe, just maybe Zell riding the T-Board (pictured above by DeviantArt user ValyChan) was the turning point for Japanese games development in trying too hard to incorporate Western imagery into their games?

Up until that point everything was going good, but look where we are now. Just this month Square Enix bemoaned the embarrassing state of their domestic development and praised their own Western studios for garnering oodles of great press at E3 for games like Tomb Raider (the reboot, not the original that featured zero squealing and 100% more triangle side boob).

Now that you know exactly what moment marked the tipping point, maybe you should do something about it? If only there was a way you could go back in time to fix a chrono-fail of such epic proportions.

Ah, you see where I’m going with this; good. While you’re back there, please convince Square not to make Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or kill everyone involved. That’s the only way we can keep Nathan Drake from disappearing like Nathan Fillion on the set of the Uncharted film. Good luck! Our very existence depends on your success.

Remember, if you tell anyone about Tidus being a dream of a civilization, you will tear a hole the size of the head of a needle in the space time continuum ’cause no one gives a shit about Tidus; get over it. He’s just another douche in the long line of Square Enix throw-away male protagonists they put in their games to appeal to a wider market.

Where was I? Hoverboards. They’re clearly overdue.