along with red dead redemption skate 3 has consumed me in the same fashion previous installments have. Trying my best to keep it on hardcore mode to reap the satisfaction of landing even the simplest of lines, tho I throw it into normal every once in a while just to keep my sanity.

I grew up skateboarding. Grade 5 is when it all started. I can safely say that skateboarding and its culture have shaped my life more than anything, well except for excellent parenting… but I digress…..

Having bought into many a video game franchise over the years I too have been suckered into such lame attempts to take skateboarding to a console. There was of course skate or die on the NES, followed by skate or die 2 which was actually a decent game all things considered. Yet it wasn’t until the playstation that skateboarding really got to shine.

Tony Hawks Pro Skater (THPS) pretty much dominated as the bee all and end all in skateboarding games and while I vaguely remember some other titles that came out shortly thereafter nothing took hold of the skateboarding gamers much like THPS did.

With THPS coming out seasonally like madden it got kinda stale, I never picked up the last two in the series since it didnt make any sense too. There were some sligt changes and graphics got better with new hardware, some slight control alterations and another THPS was released to the world. Then along came EA.

I first found out about skate through Rob & Big, an MTV show featuring PRO skater Rob Dyrdek and his bodyguard and friend Big Black. They visited the EA campus up in Vancouver to demo a then playable version of the game and to lend their characters to the game as well as record some MOCAP.

So. On friday I got the newly acquired xbox online by running some CAT5 cable through the cold air return to my basement where the xbox is situated, You ask why hardwire? well I have 50 feet of CAT5 lying around and I dont thing the microsoft approved wireless adapter at a cost of 120$ CAD is worth anything not to mention the fact that my powerbook gets 2 bars of wireless out of 4 in the basement and plus I have a speed need.

With the Skate demo clocking in at just over 1GB I got a chance to sit down with the half hour at a time demo and get to relearning everything I was always doing wrong in THPS. The mechanics of Skate although similar are vastly different from the last THPS I was playing. They have incorporated this flick stick to make your skater ollie something that was always done with a button press before. This coupled with the way you flick the same right analogue stick to do fliptricks and shove-its was something that kept me crashing into the ground, or into objects as the timing of olling kept me for the first half hour catching my front on curbs and low level objects.

From the demo alone skate is unbeliveable, the camera angles while they took sometime to get used too were great. This games really helps catch the essence of freeroaming and creating line upon lines of tricks. While there were objectives set out in the demo I quickly got sidetracked and pulled into learning manuals and attempting to string lines together throughout the level. One thing that you quickley notice is that the level of phsical realism in the realy of physics of skate is way different than THPS which takes some time to get used too.

Skate drops in september on the 12th and I’ll be picking it up for sure.