It's not possible to think of skating games without Neversoft's Tony Hawk series immediately springing to mind (unless you've been in a coma since the mid 90s), so you'll have to forgive the fact that I'll be using it for comparison throughout this review. To start with a little Tony Hawk history, ever since the first demo dropped on PSone in 1999, it's been the definitive skateboarding title, and one I've followed from the start right up to Project 8. As the series grew, so did the repertoire of tricks, meaning, primarily, more and more ways to extend your combo. This, in this reviewer's opinion, is where it all started going a bit wrong, especially when the inclusion of reverts meant you could continue combos even after coming down from a quarter-pipe. I want to do cool things in a skating game in order to create the illusion that I am cool. Yes, I am perfectly willing to live in the Matrix, thank you very much. But when I start to pull off 3 million point robotic-looking combos even my willing brain starts to reject the illusion. Back-of-the-neck plugs and a slimy bath, here I come.

   By the time Tony Hawk's: Underground came out, it was all starting to feel very "same old" and soulless, and the addition of tedious Jackass-type malarkey in light of the show's popularity caused many players to lose a lot of respect for the series. Neversoft spoke of how they'd rebuilt the engine from scratch for Hawk's current-gen debut in Project 8, and how the physics would finally begin to bear a passing resemblance to reality. And how they'd even give out free crackers with purchase. This did get a lot of people excited, as tricks that appear even slightly feasible look a lot better than ridiculous double back flips off four-storey buildings. This grand promise turned out to be little more than marketing, however, as Project 8 turned out very similar to earlier Tony Hawk games, yet again featuring jet powered skating and impossible combos. Horribly, even the free crackers turned out to be little more than thin air. It seems as if Neversoft decided to rest on their laurels with the series over the last few years - churning out an annual sequel with minor improvements over the last one, not unlike that other evil company gamers love to hate, EA.

EA E I O

   Ironically, it is that very Electronic Arts' Black Box studio that has provided innovation where Neversoft has failed. We were promised that Skate would make even the simple act of popping an ollie a pleasure. As I'd joylessly popped an ollie by simply pressing and letting go of X for so many years, I didn't believe it for a second. I was wrong. The first thing seasoned Tony Hawk's players will have to do before they can get the hang of Skate, is unlearn everything they've known - Skate is a completely different game. Taking a page from the Fight Night success book, ollies and flip tricks are performed by flicking the right stick, and the result is no less than a revolution in skating games - the correlation with what your hands are doing and what's happening on-screen is unbelievably intuitive and gratifying, as all the motions are somewhat based on their real-life physical counterparts. Charging down causes the skater to bend his knees, which makes the runs look much more natural - I played the Tony Hawk's Proving Ground demo recently, and the absence of crouching before ollies was very noticeable now that Skate has shown me the light. Flicking straight upwards after crouching results in an ollie, and the further you crouch down, the higher the ollie. Charging down and flicking up and slightly to the right (to about 2 o'clock) results in a kickflip.

   At first, nearly all the flip tricks you'll perform will probably be variations of kickflips, heelflips and shove-its (spelled as "shuvit" in the game) as they are the easiest, most basic tricks. Harder tricks are combinations of these simpler elements. There's some real depth to the system and it will take many hours of practice and experimentation to get a decent handle on it. The difference between, for example, a varial kickflip and a 360 flip is so miniscule that it will take a long time before you can deliberately perform either one on demand without accidentally doing the other, or another trick entirely. It's hard, but the plus side is that when you purposely flick a difficult trick, you'll feel pretty pleased with yourself, and more like you actually did it, as opposed to simply pressing a direction on the d-pad with square to see the exact same animation you've seen thousands of times before.

   Another difference between Skate and Tony Hawk is that you aren't magically propelled about - you have to push manually by pressing X. Just like with the crouching animation, having your skater push makes for far more realistic-looking runs. Three pushes takes you to maximum speed. It takes a bit of self-control to stop yourself unnecessarily hammering the button all the time (although you can hold it for the same effect if you like). If you do this at the start, during the tutorial, you will be told to ease up: "this game isn't a button- basher", apparently - an obvious dig at poor old Tone.

Grinders keepers

Smoothly does it

   It's all about fluidity and grace. Combos are still present, but there's deliberately less emphasis on them - hell, they refuse to even call them combos, using the term "sequences" instead. Like you'd expect, a sequence is performing a set of tricks without all four wheels hitting the ground. Performing a sequence will trigger a multiplier of either, 1.5, 2 or 3, which counts down (represented by a depleting bar in the bottom left corner), meaning you must perform another trick before it expires to keep the multiplier going - this is called a line. If you are a Tony Hawk player you'll probably be surprised to learn that you don't lose the score for your whole line when you bail.

   In a very brave move (even Fight Night didn't go this far!), Black Box decided to have no stat increases or new tricks to unlock throughout the course of the game - all abilities are available to you from the very beginning, making your skill as a player the only thing standing between you and the game's harder tricks. Personally, I enjoy the feeling of progression that building stats and unlocking abilities provides in games, so discovering this was a disappointment to me at first. However, given the learning curve of the controls, when you consider just how long it would take to master a totally new ability, it all seems rather irrelevant. The key thing is that you can feel yourself improving as you play over time, committing movements for difficult flips on the right stick to memory and learning to perform them consistently.

   I was really annoyed when Neversoft ditched the replay function in Tony Hawk's 3 so it's great to know that all the best 30 second runs in Skate can be saved, edited (albeit quite basically) and shared with the world via Skate.Reel. If you get bored of playing on your own, you can also go online and get called a fag whilst seeing how your skills match up with the rest of the world in games like S.K.A.T.E, Spot Attack (get the highest score on a certain object) and Jam (get the most points in the allotted time).

Everyday I'm hustlin'

   The career mode is the best way to learn how to play Skate, as you'll often be tasked with doing specific tricks over certain objects, like performing an ollie 360 flip to an FS overcrooks grind. The idea of the career mode is to get photos in skateboard magazines and film footage for videos. You'll also need to choose which of the game's many sponsors you'll want to represent - no shortage of in-game advertising in this one! Some of the career mode challenges are a lot more difficult than others, but you'll have to persevere if you want to unlock the X games skate park, home of the mega ramp, or Danny Way's outdoor mega compound, home of an even more mega ramp. One of the things you'll have to do to progress is beat a series of pros at S.K.A.T.E, which is very similar to H.O.R.S.E in Tony Hawk, only you don't have to match or exceed your opponent's score, but rather exactly match their tricks. It gets very hard by the time you reach Mike Carroll, as from him onwards the pros often perform very challenging tricks, don't bail a great deal, and land nearly all of the tricks you set. It becomes a matter of getting in front so that you're the one setting the trick, and staying there without bailing or repeating a trick within your last three. Strangely enough, you don't necessarily have to perform hard tricks when setting the trick - opponents have earned themselves a letter trying to match a simple ollie before. It's probably the drugs.

   The game does provide some respite from the career challenges via a series of races. Although fun for a brief period, these are not really what Skate is about, however. The low, behind-the-skater camera certainly isn't well-suited to racing, sometimes making it very difficult to see what's up ahead of you.

Yep, that's a gun in my pocket, and I am not happy to see you

   There are many "spots" to discover throughout San Vanelona - these are particular places/landmarks in which you must exceed a set number of points. This might be a good point to mention how irritating pedestrians and other skaters can be in this game - there are a fair amount of them, and many times they'll make a mess of your latest challenge attempt by bumbling about in your way, making you wish the game would go all GTA for a moment and allow you to get out an Uzi and kill them all so you can skate your spot in peace - politely asking them to leave the area probably wouldn't work. Ahh, just saying that makes the little killer in me feel better already.

   As you explore the various locales of San Venelona, you can place session markers to immediately put you back to a designated point, which is very handy when you want to try something over and over again, especially seeing how your poor skater cannot ever get off his board and walk around on foot. Poor guy, that must surely be enough to qualify for disability benefit. Hopefully this issue will be rectified in the sequel as things can get very annoying when you want to session a spot you can see at the top of a flight of stairs, but have to find a round-about way of getting up there first, when a real human being would simply be able to walk up the steps. Well, unless it's a human being that accidentally crazy glued itself to a skateboard, of course. There's been an alarming number of those around lately.

Skate Bush

   Although Skate is more about the joy of free-skating than about completing objectives, I think it would've benefited from having gaps to find, as sometimes, when you trick over specific objects (like manualing down a thin ledge for example) you feel you deserve additional recognition and more points than if you did the same thing on a flat surface. Sometimes it almost feels as if the developers left certain things like that out on purpose, solely as they'd be too reminiscent of Tony Hawk. Having gaps to find would extend the career modes lifespan considerably as well.

   Despite some of these minor flaws, and just in case I haven't made it blatantly clear throughout this review, Skate is absolutely great. It's extremely rare these days for a complete genre of game to be revolutionized, but Skate has done just that. It does for skating games what Mario 64 did for platformers all those years back - it really is that good. Now go buy it!

       ... Lunk