Official Website

Platform: PlayStation 3,Xbox 360

Genre: Extreme Sports

Number of Players: 1 (1-4 Online)

Supported HD: 720p, PlayStation Network Compatible

I’ve been playing skateboarding video games since I was twelve years old and would spend six hours at a time in the Harrah’s Casino arcade in Lake Tahoe doing handplants on what appeared to be Excitebike ramps and running from a swarm of bees in Atari’s 720, the first extreme sports video game. Back in 1986, spinning that circle-motion joystick around was cutting edge, but it was very shortly after that I discovered that I could actually go outside and skate on a REAL board. Fast forward 14 years and I was managing a skate/BMX shop in Portland, OR and had discovered something very interesting along the way...no matter how many extreme sports games I would play, from T&C Surf Designs on my NES system to the myriad of Tony Hawk titles, not one of them has ever really captured the “feel” of skateboarding.

When I discovered in the Tony Hawk series that I could apply cheats to actually make the game more realistic, I had a brief glimmer of hope. Gone were the days of four city block grinds and quintuplet 360 heelflips; which are both great if of course you happen to be 12 years old and don’t actually know how to skateboard, but can be quite taxing when you want to immerse yourself in a simulated skateboarding experience for a few hours. The trouble is, when I had grown tired or bored of the game, the very next one released would be another psycho-speed, super-human, button-masher. Ugg.

Well, I know I am not alone in this, and while the gamers who love the over-the-top Tony Hawk experience are certainly entitled, the rest of us finally have reason to celebrate. EA Sports is here to save skate games from an eternity of over-glamorized misrepresentation. With the release of Skate. the emphasis can finally be placed on the skillful execution of skateboarding maneuvers instead of the skillful execution of timely button combos. This is a game where you will cease to feel like a gamer and really start to feel like a skater.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat. Skate. is like no other skating game you have experienced if only from the control aspect. Here, you are not controlling your skater and performing precise button strikes to execute your tricks. Instead, you are asked to control the actual board, initiating only the wood’s slap into the ground. From there, your skater’s body, grabs, and feet are all independently controlled in the air. While this may seem confusing when you read it, it makes a tremendous amount of sense actually. Let’s take a look...

In some games, if you want to grind a rail, you simply press the “jump” button and then the “grind” button. Here you must begin the trick by slapping the board down; this is done by flicking the control stick in a variety of ways. So now that you’re headed up, you are going to need to turn those feet. If you want a boardslide you can’t just be pressing the button, you have to turn your feet, directing the board perpendicular to the rail. If you land in the right spot, your boardslidin’. If you turn a little shy you might feeble it; a little too much to the side and your tailsliding. It is all about placement...say it with me...”just like the real thing”. Now for the dismount. This game isn’t going to turn your body back straight for you. No way! When you come popping of the end of that rail, your last job is to make sure you turn your body back so you can stomp it and ride away clean.

While this sort of control scheme may mean a much longer learning curve than you are used to, and just may be alienating to earlier age gamers, it is far more rewarding in the long run for everyone. When you stick a late kickflip down a ten stair or feeble down a marble ledge, you ride away with a sense of accomplishment...so much more so then “pressing the right button”. The trick list is immense and the variety and fluidness of each combo is truly amazing. Rest assured this is the closest you can get to skateboarding without swellbow and torn up shoes. It’s time to buy some pads for your thumbs people...

Next up, this game looks freaking great. Stick this sucker side by side with Tony Hawk: Project 8 and it clips that games wings easily. I’m not gonna lie to you, there is quite a bit of redundancy in this game. There are only a handful of different cars that drive these streets making ever third or fourth one the same. There is a distinct lack of variety in the pedestrians walking down the street, meaning you will see the same old lady waddling up hills in the neighborhood and cruising the streets of the financial district. But the thing is, everything looks amazing and the sheer size of the openly roamable game area would have made it nearly impossible to offer a ton of variety for these visual aspects.

But let me tell you, if these developers were gonna spend endless time giving us variety, I am sure happy that it was with the skating terrain and not individual pedestrian faces. And at this they succeeded fantastically. What you have here is a whole town to skate; and I’m not just talking about a school, an airport, a neighborhood block and a shopping mall. You actually get a WHOLE town to skate. Downtown stretches for many streets in each direction...skyscrapers, parking garages, fountains and every other manner of concrete obstacle present themselves block after block. Head out to the suburbs and find the elementary school, the high school, backyard ramp setups, a mini-mart and gobs of other terrain.

There are four major sections of town in all, fully connected the entire time you play. At any moment you can decide to head across town and session a favorite spot, but you might want to think about taking the subway or teleporting to your favorite saved locations. To skate the entire length of this open map, without side trips, can take almost 15 minutes. This is a seriously HUGE environment. Some have complained that the sheer size of this game makes it difficult to find the spots you are looking for, but with some creative use of the games options you can be out and back in no time. Besides, hunting for a sick spot to session is one of the staples of street skating!

Of course, with all of this area to cover and all these tricks to perform, it is inevitable that you will be pulling off some incredible tricks. You know the ones where everyone in the room is looking away when you finally land it and you throw the controller and start screaming your victory cry while they all say...”Do it again, WE MISSED IT!”. Well, thanks to my personal favorite aspect of Skate.’s design you can pull up a replay of your recent skating and shove your sick moves in everyone’s face. But why stop there? Edit the replay down to the best part and save it as a video that you can watch over and over again. Heck, grab some stills from it and no you’ve got mag fodder as well as some footy! Then, when all is said and done, post it online and make the entire world jealous of your talents.

Beyond exploring this vast cityscape and showing off your skills, there is of course a GAME at the heart of this beast; and what you will find here is just about what you would expect. You are an amateur skater who needs some shots in magazines, some footage in a video and a couple of contest wins to make it pro. Here, of course, you actually get to film that video and you yourself choose those photos, but otherwise this all progresses much the way we have gotten used to. Skate up to various pro’s, get a challenge from them to help make you a better skater and move ever closer to your goal. You will also go head to head with these pro’s, follow them to secret spots, and dodge security guards to bag some really special locations.

All this is done with either one of the games imbedded skater templates, one of the many pro’s you can unlock through game play, or with the skater that you designed yourself. The level of customization is fairly high as you can change not only dozens of hairstyles, accessories, shirts, pants, and shoes, but also the very bone structure of your face. Of course there is a TON...more than I have seen...of unlockable and purchasable merchandise from all manner of skateboarding’s top brands. This inclusion is the bread and butter of so many skate games, but when attached to a game that is already so unique and well done, it just serves as icing on the cake!

Lastly, by taking your skills online you can progress in even another way. Through races and trick contests you can climb through the ranks of other online players, or simply just free skate with a slew of folks you don’t know. In what may be the most realistic representation of skateboarding, when playing online you can have your runs snaked and collide with an entire mob of little kids who are out for their first day at the skatepark! Seriously though, there is much fun to be had either solo or with the online masses in this game.

In a gamer’s world where we spend so much time arguing over which system is better or which game is good, we can sometimes loose sight of the fact that there are games being made which will someday, if not today, be seen as groundbreaking. These games take us to the next level, effectively saying “It is time for a change and that change starts now”. Skate. is such a game.

-aaron-