It’s 2026 now. You know, a new year and all. You know what’s not new? Aggressive Inline for the GameCube. That’s kinda what I’ve been playing the most of over the last few days.
I don’t think I’ve ever really written about it at length, but I have a very strong proclivity for skate-based games. Whether said skates be of the board or inline variety, as long as I’m rolling around and flying off ramps and doing tricks and grinds and generally being a menace to society, I’m very happy. The very early 2000s soundtracks also help out a lot.
I loaded up Aggressive Inline just for a little taste the other night, and then ended up accidentally playing it until 2AM. I don’t stay up until 2AM anymore (on purpose). And I didn’t even get past the first stage.
Of course, a reasonable chunk of that time was spent on the rather robust tutorial, re-learning how to play the game and how the controls differ from Tony Hawk’s. I played dozens upon dozens of hours of this game back in the day -or at least that’s how I remember it- but my Pro Skater muscle memory is still much stronger, and the slightly different button layout really ended up throwing me for a loop. By the end of my first session, I still wasn’t entirely comfortable with the control scheme, but I was getting there.
And then there was the “difficult” choice of choosing a skater to play as. The game comes loaded with something like a dozen facsimiles of real-life roller-blade mans, and I don’t know a single one of them. My passion for skating lies entirely in the video games and the general culture, not the athletes. But for the sake of “diversity” (oh and how that has changed in the last 20 years), there are also two playable female characters, both of them custom-made for the game. Because there were no real girls that rollerbladed in 2002, of course. And one of those fictional girls, Chrissy, I’m sure exists solely as a showcase for Z-Axis’ then-innovative boob-jiggling physics technology. And oh lordy, do those boobs a-jiggle. Like, way way too much.
So of course I was playing as Chrissy. I always did. It’s tradition.
There isn’t really a ton I can say about my actual experience with the game, other than I forgot how different it is from the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise. Yeah, it’s the same in that you pick a stage and then complete challenges, but you’re not on a hard timer in Aggressive Inline. Instead, you have a juice meter that’s very slowly running down. You can refill it by doing tricks and collecting gigantic, glowing juice boxes that are scattered about the stages. And it really doesn’t take a lot of tricking to get it back to full, either, so it’s very easy to end up playing a single session for, well, hours. While it does lose that “just one more run” effect by essentially giving you unlimited time to play, it’s maybe even harder to put down because you basically need to choose when you’re going to end your session. I suppose bad players could, in theory, actually run out of juice, but I’m not exactly a super star myself and I was never once in danger of a Game Over.
My one real true beef with Aggressive Inline is the soundtrack. But not for the choice of music. Perish the thought! I’ve regularly listened to it as a YouTube playlist over the years. No, I hate how short it is. In my couple hours of play, I must have cycled through the entire track list at least three times. Maybe even four. I wasn’t exactly counting. I’m not going to look it up or anything, but I think that a generous guess would place it at thirteen songs. For a PS1 game, okay, maybe that would have been sufficient. But this is PS2 era! They could have easily fit double that amount in there. I’m sure it’s was more of a licensing limitation though; Acclaim folded in 2004, so I doubt that in 2002 they were just throwing around bags of money. Or maybe they were and that’s exactly why they went defunct. Who knows? Not I. For whatever reason, there’s just not nearly enough music in this game.
Oh, and also someone really dropped the ball on balancing the audio levels for the music. Some songs are significantly louder than others, and there’s at least one in there that you can barely even hear over the clack-clack-clack of your skates.
So yeah! It’s been great fun! I don’t know how much I’ll really end up playing, but I do want to at least unlock all the levels to get the full breadth of the experience. Completing all the objectives and finding all the collectibles is… maybe not as high up there on the priority list, but we’ll see! If I continue having as much fun as I have been so far, I might finally finish the game for the first time ever. It’s weird that I played it as much as I did but never truly beat it, right?
