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Skate Or Die is Electronic Arts' contribution to the Great Skateboarding Revival (founder: M. Pattenden & Assocs.) and, with some reservations, it's a worthwhile addition to the small but growing number of skateboarding sims available.

There are five events to try your skills at, but first you've got to register with Rodney, the gruff and aged punk proprietor of the skateshop. Once you've entered your name in the registration form you get to choose from quite a wide range of board colours, then it's down to the most important choice - practice or compete.

The reason I say this is an important choice is that Skate Or Die has one very irritating feature: each event has a lengthy pause to be endured during loading. If you choose "compete", once you've finished an event you can't go straight back to try it again without sitting about twiddling your thumbs for about three minutes (and I was playing with the disk version - what it'll be like for you unfortunate cassette-loaders I shudder to think).

So for maximum enjoyment, at least until you've become reasonably skilful at the game, go for "practice". Now you'll find yourself outside the Skateshop, with the different events represented, 720 Degrees-style, by different streets to be taken.

Freestyle is more or less the same as California Games' "half-pipe" event - you get points for various tricks attempted while barrelling around the inside of an enormous U-shaped bowl. There are two "Pump Zones" in the floor and pressing the trigger on your joystick while you've moving through these enables you to attempt certain tricks. This event is really quite good crack, though you'll have to go through a considerable amount of trial-and-error if you want to be able to do every possible stunt without going through the tiresome process of reading the instructions [Lazy git - Ed]. Even after I'd read the instructions I found some of the more spectacular tricks still eluded me. "Try tweaking your aerials by clicking in mid-air" the instructions suggested [Oooooh, sounds painful - Ed] and I did, but to no avail.

After all that concentration and timing, High Jump was a birrova doddle. The idea here is to see how high in the air you can go above the top rim of the half-pipe. Simply waggle your joystick like a maniac to gather impetus on your journey down from the opposite rim and see how you measure up against the graduated pole at the far side. Mad Mike P. had a shot at this and pronounced it "good fun" but after a few goes I must say that I found the challenge a wee bit too easy.

Downhill Race, on the other hand is well 'ard, sending you careering down a country road racetrack, scattered with gravel, flags and even hurdles to be negotiated. You get a choice of control movements - "regular" (which involves pulling back on the joystick to move forward, and which I found near-impossible to use) and "goofy" (which, far from being as its name suggests, allows you to control the board in a most realistic and sensible way). You're racing against time here, and, believe me, you'll need your wits about you to get your bonus.

And if you think Downhill Race is a toughie, just check out Downhill Jam, in which you take on a buddy - or a computer-supplied local toughie - in a real Tom-And-Jerry style race through a hazardous series of back alleys. This really isn't easy, especially as you're each allowed to try to kick and punch the other off his board, thereby gaining valuable seconds and ground. The Jam is also where the humour of Skate Or Die really comes into its own. In early events coming a cropper might be accompanied by a simultaneous falling off of your helmet and pads. But in this event you're a trendy and rather violent punk - no padding, no helmet - and when things go wrong, the results are far more unusual. There are manholes to be fallen down, walls to run into and bins to be tripped over - often accompanied by the temporary loss of your fright-wig - but undoubtedly the best fate, or at least the funniest, is when you hit one of the two stretches of wire fence which hinder your progress; at first you seem to have passed straight through unscathed, but then, in a classic Hanna Barbara sequence, you fall to the floor in a heap of dissected fragments! The winner is the first one to reach the squad car which awaits you at the end of the last alley - presumably to cart you both off to borstal.

Finally, in Pool Joust you take on either your mate or one of three local nasties in a fight on wheels in an empty swimming pool. There's two of you and just one "paddle" which changes hands every five glasses. When you've got it, do your best to hit your opponent with it while it's flashing, when he's got it, avoid him as best you can. Manoeuvring around the pool isn't easy and, frankly, seems a rather hit-or-miss affair. The first player to get three falls wins - but like in tennis you have to win by at least two points so if it's a ding-dong battle, it can continue for ever, or until you both get bored with this rather tedious event.

An overall reaction? Well, Skate Or Die is a "quality product", as we in CU Towers say: The graphics are good, the music's fine and the movement is well up to the very high standards necessary in games of this type. That said, it does seem to fall down a bit on some of its events - neither High Jump nor Pool Joust would have seen the light of day I'd been programmer - and the aforementioned loading pauses are an irritant. And while Skate Or Die does make an attempt at being as sassy and street-smart as the real thing, it's only on the Downhill Jam that it really succeeds in raising a laugh as well as a sweat. In my opinion the best "event" games rely almost as much on quirkiness and humour as gameplay for their appeal and in this respect Skate Or Die, despite a brave effort doesn't quite cut it.

All in all then, a good sim and well worth a look - but we're holding out for 720 Degrees for some real thrills.