The Skyscraper District
The level I return to most often in Jet Set Radio Future – by now I’ve been returning for almost twenty years – is also the level that has never really made sense to me. As the name suggests, The Skyscraper District and Pharaoh Park is a level that covers two areas – a downtown hub of honey-coloured stone filled with pedestrians, and then…? Well, I’ll get to that.
Pharaoh Park is the bit that’s never clicked. It’s bright and somewhat tacky, a bunch of little pyramids and obelisks leading to a funny spinny building. Beneath it all is a sort of net, where you can skate down and discover that the whole area is suspended high over an endless drop, nearby superscrapers screaming downwards to the depths.
Shopping centre? Weird folly? Theme restaurant? Why are we all here? Very soon, I tire of Pharaoh Park and head to the other part of the map.
Over to the side. Up the obelisk, a grind and then a jump. Ahead of me are a series of huge satellite dishes pointed straight skywards, their bowls forming platforms that I can jump from to get to the level’s highest points. This moment, incidentally, a lone skater jumping between satellite dishes, might be the high water point of my career in games. It’s such a wonderful thing to do.