Touchgrind for Mac

Free
Illusion labs

At first I was going to make a screencast of my time with Touchgrind for Mac. The plan was to impress you all with my sick laser flips and bluntside nosegrinds. But after playing Touchgrind for Mac for a while, I’m sure that anything I screencasted would be nothing more than a fails compilation. I am objectively and quantifiably horrible at Touchgrind.

Touchgrind for Mac is free (its superstar iOS counterpart costs $5, however) and well-polished. It’s no fault of Illusion Labs that I can’t land a kick flip to save my life. I’m just really uncoordinated.

Skateboarding is controlled by placing two fingers about an inch apart on your trackpad and then moving them as if they’re your skateboarder’s legs. Imagine a tech deck in iOS form.

The game doesn’t make it easy on you though, and there’s a steep learning curve that many will never get over. Fortunately, there’s incentive for the tenacious — boards are unlocked at different point intervals (score 75,000 points? Sick, here’s a board with a koi fish on it). It’s possible that these boards have different effects on gameplay, but I sucked with all of them, including the Noob board which makes controlling the board easier.

While my suckage usually keeps my single run scores under 50,000, at one point I accidentally did a huge kick flip onto a rail and then a kick flip off the rail and then landed it for well over 100,000 points and shot my multiplier up. That run netted me over 300,000 (a score I haven’t even been close to scratching again).

Like real skateboarding, I still love Touchgrind, even if I’m disgustingly horrible at it.