Skate [X360]

Something that may surprise you is that, at this point in the development at least, grinding is automatic. All you need to do is to hop up on a rail and your skater will take care of balancing himself. Your moves, however, are entirely left to you, which is where things can get tricky if you want to show off. The reasoning for this is that the developers say that they want the focus to be on the tricks rather than managing a balancing act. Your guy is a skater, after all, so he should be able to hit a five-foot rail without too many problems.

The coolest thing about the game is that the control scheme once again makes skating fun. Simple things like performing a kick-flip down a set of stairs or hitting a rail stopped being fun a long time ago in the Tony Hawk games, but EA has managed to make these feel great again. For roughly the hour that we played the game we simply cruised about in the skate park and just sessioned. We weren't thinking about goals, what lie outside of the park or anything else - we quite simply just wanted to skate, and we can't think of higher praise for the game than that.

The game is still in a relatively early state, so we were limited to an enclosed skate park for our session. What we know of the outside world is that it will be bustling with life, with pedestrians filling the streets and traffic running this way and that. We're told that the design of San Vanelona, which is a fictional city based in part on San Francisco, Venice Beach and Barcelona, will be mostly realistic in nature rather than littered with ramps and such like the Tony Hawk environments are. Again, this plays into the realism that EA is focusing on and encourages experimentation with lines and style.

Should you happen to find a sweet line and want to show it to your friends, skate will allow you to do so in a couple ways. The game features a full replay mode, allowing you to go back in time by about a minute and then play back your efforts at any speed, much like you can in sports game replays. You can mark a section of time and set up camera angles for a saved replay. If you upload the actual save data, others with skate can download them and have full control over the camera, playback speed and such. However, what's cooler is that you'll actually be able to save your replay directly to the web as a video file so that anyone can watch it from any computer. With this, the camera angles, speed and such that you set up will be your final movie, so you're given strict artistic control over your highlight reels.

As for other online options, EA is remaining tight-lipped about what we'll see in the game, but there will indeed be some sort of online play.

We've only seen a very small amount of what's to come in Skate, but we're seriously impressed at this point. Though it may be tough, the game feels extremely natural and subsequently very rewarding. When you nail a triple-heel flip, you feel like you actually earned it rather than having just pressed a couple buttons. We simply cannot wait to hop on a board again.

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