skate.

skate.


skate. (yes, with the illogical period) is a breath of fresh air coming from the old, "press A to crank a 900°" school of skateboarding, and it represents a change in the very ethics of how skating games will be made from here on out. Tony Hawk already cancelled their 2008 offering, ostensibly to "retool" their scheme, but really it's because skate. so soundly kicked their ass that they are scrambling for some kind of answer, and it isn't coming from their dev team.

The central, defining point of skate. is its unique, analog "flickit" controls, 100% analog representations of your on-screen activities. Gone are ridiculous fetch-quests, 1000 foot grinds or "big air" measured in football fields. It's just street skating along the fictional roads of San Vanelona (San Francisco, Vancouver and Barcelona mixed together), with the occasional challenge thrown in as you take your created skater through the ranks to achieve super-stardom (and a cover shot on Thrasher magazine, natch).

While the graphics are perfectly servicable, with a full, real world to explore with no loading times, and the music and sound effects perfectly adequate (even through the stilted deliveries of pro skaters liberally littered across the landscape), it's the control sceme that will keep you coming back. Literally every move in the game is available from the moment you start the tutorial, and the only limit is your own ability to hit the exact placement on the right stick for any particular move.

With a beautiful online integration, and the ability to seamlessly share videos and pics (a personal favorite of mine being Clang Clang), skate. offers a full plate of interactivity and community to go along with the single-player mode. The challenge ramps up just gradually enough, and button-mashing will get you nowhere in the frenzied calm of a high-score trick contest. I literally cannot go on enough about the tactile sensation that comes from trying a trick twenty times in a row (easy as pie thanks to a genius checkpoint-maker that can reset you to the top of a hill to try that gnarly transfer one more time) only to finally nail it after a long string of bone-breaking crashes.

Graphics: The entire city is explorable with no loading times whatsoever, and even though the hats all look slightly 'off,' everything about the city itself looks great. 4.
Sound: Nothing fancy, and the soundtrack has too much of a mish-mash feel. You'll be plugging in your iPod very soon. 2.
Controls: The star of the show. It's never felt so good to try something twenty times in a row. 5.
Tilt: You can't get closer to skateboarding without grip tape and a truck key. 5.
Overall (not an average): 5.