Aggressive Inline carves a unique path in the extreme sports genre on the Gamecube. While comparisons to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater are inevitable, Aggressive Inline offers a distinct feel with its own brand of tricks and a focus on completing objectives within large, open levels. The level design is imaginative, the soundtrack is pumping, and the aggressive inline skating itself is a blast to master. However, some frustrating control quirks and a lack of polish compared to its competitor hold it back slightly.

My first PS2 game!
I remember seeing a preview and (I think) an ad in Game Informer for 'Chris Edwards Aggressive Inline'. I thought if BMX could copy the Tony Hawk formula, why not inline skating? I asked for the game and a PS2 for my birthday and my parents delivered.
I knew a few of the skaters from casual TV viewing of inline competitions (I vaguely remember... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Sports_Channel maybe?)

My friends and I played the heck out of this. The soundtrack was amazing, coloring my music preferences for my high school years. It's what really hooks you, I think. We'd put in the "unlock all keys" cheat and just skate around, doing missions only really when we pleased. We realized you could load a map, then swap the disk to a second PS2, and keep playing the large map as long as you didn't encounter any loading. We had one copy for the longest time, but eventually bought two or more. I even bought it used for Gamecube much later.

Maybe not the best game ever, but one I have a soft spot for, certainly!

The answer to “we have Jet Set Radio at home”.

The soundtrack massively outshines the gameplay and it lacks the polish of the Tony Hawk series, so you probably have to care at least a little about inline skating to get much from it. That said, I sunk many evenings into this as a kid and I don’t fancy taking off my nostalgia goggles just yet.

Also, Activision liked it enough to buy out the company and implement a bunch of its game design into the Tony Hawk series going forward so make of that what you will.

THPS on rollerblades. It plays pretty similarly to the original run of Tony Hawk games (specifically 3 and 4), open levels with no timer, only a "juice" bar that'll fail you if you run out. The goals are along the same lines, score challenges, trick challenges, photos, etc. The level designs are both the best and worst part of this game. Each level contains closed off areas that you need a key to unlock, but the little (or big) side areas are usually pretty fun and serve as both a good incentive to find the key, and to make the levels themselves more expansive. That said, the level design peaks at the second level and gets a bit iffy from there, though each level does have interactable stuff to change the level or unlock additional areas which is always fun. The goals can get pretty challenging, but you don't need many to unlock a new level so it's not too bad. The gameplay is solid, skating around feels good, combos are relatively easy to string together, all of your air tricks are only on one button but there's the standard 8 direction variations in addition to grinds and manuals. I did have some issues with getting cess slides to work consistently, but that could be owed to my old Xbox controller. Soundtrack is also solid, standard mix of punk and hip-hop and a few ska tracks. Overall pretty fun game, I enjoyed my time with it.

I can somewhat appreciate some of the stuff that Aggresive Inline manages to achieve such as having big levels without time limits (something that the Tony Hawk series would eventually do with the fourth Pro Skater game) but the rest of it...

Nah! This has aged quite poorly to be honest. It's yet another one of those games that starts off pretty decently and seems destined to be quite good but it just steadily gets more shittier and shittier as it goes on with it's poor level design and frustrating goals.

There isn't many tricks to do either alongside some glitches to contend with and why on Earth is there even a Game Over in this when there isn't much consequence asides losing some points? That's just stupid.

Sad to say, I don't like this one much and I'll be content to never go back to it.