SKATE (Xbox 360)

SKATE looks like it could be a true next-gen skateboarding sim

Skateboarding games have been dominated by one name since the turn of the Millennium. That name belongs to a man who has pioneered the sport itself for years, and his influence on the entire extreme sports genre is immeasurable, both in reality and on our TV screens.

Tony Hawk is the CEO of skateboarding and his Pro Skater series produced four absolute classics before losing its way in a quagmire of misguided novelty and Jackass-inspired immaturity. The recent Project 8 reinstated a little faith in the series, which has rarely seen imitation and had an easy job shrugging off the few inferior competitors it has faced.

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That may all be about to change though, with EA's announcement of SKATE, a new approach to skateboarding games that may yet knock Tony Hawk from his well balanced perch.

"I come from 30 years of game playing and 30 years of skating" explains Jay Balmer, associate producer of SKATE, "[I]and while you can't get away from Tony Hawk, as we're using the same tricks, with SKATE we have developed something very different from that particular series."

What defines SKATE is not so much what it adds to the Hawk formula, but what it takes away. There is no button for jump, grind, or flip. The face buttons are barely used in fact. The fantastical and gigantic 'special' stunts are absent, and the general rota of tricks is slimmed down and select. There are few of the infinite looping lines that provided the immense scores in the better of the Pro Skater games.

The left stick controls steering left and right, and leaning forward and back, as is the standard, but the right stick dictates the real trickery by representing your body weight.

Do not be misled though. While SKATE takes a back-to-basics approach to skating, it is looking to be anything but a lesser game than the current offerings. Its biggest revolution comes in the controls, which are wonderfully simple and relate far more directly to actually skateboarding than Tony Hawk's button-bashing combo system. The way SKATE works is far easier to explain to a skater, but will certainly be instinctive to all gamers.

The left stick controls steering left and right, and leaning forward and back, as is the standard, but the right stick dictates the real trickery by representing your body weight. To ollie, you pull back the stick to draw your skater's body back and down, before flicking the stick forward to throw your skater forward and lift the board in the air. This is a wonderful translation of the movement of a basic ollie and feels more akin to skateboarding than anything yet released.

Kickflips, shuv-its and the myriad of other tricks that give the sport its rich and confusing jargon are achieved by subtle variations on the ollie, as is the case in the real world. To heelflip, for example, rather than flicking the right stick forward, you flick it off to the left, mimicking the foot movements of reality.

This literal translation of authentic skating permeates the whole game, which is realised with some inspired reductions in complexity of control. To grind for example, you just ollie and land with the right part of the board over the edge you want to grind. To boardslide (or skid, for readers who haven't wasted their youth getting grazed) you just turn a little tighter, rather than using an extra button. To manual (or wheelie) you just lean back on the body weight stick.

The game is still being refined, as Balmer explains: "It is an on going challenge. There's always been lots of ideas of pressing buttons, but we've really fought against that and it has been a design challenge"

Your skater is viewed from a low angle, as if you're being cammed by another skater.

Complicated to explain and easy to play, the actual impact of the controls on the game is immense. Suddenly the simplest of tricks are a challenge, but the satisfaction of landing them is immeasurable. You feel in absolute control of the skateboard and skater, and are constantly aware of what you are doing, as opposed to the evolution of the Hawk games, which lead you into a frenzy of button-bashing with little emphasis on what was actually happening beneath your feet. Face buttons are reserved for pushing and breaking, with the shoulders controlling your hands for grabs.

SKATE forces you to skate like a skater. You easily find yourself practicing the same trick again and again, subtly tweaking your finger movements until you nail your own personal goal after a good deal of trial and error. And once again, just like in reality, the harder tricks require more deft and accurate finger movements, rather than just hammering more buttons.

The developer's insistent pursuit of accuracy continues throughout the game, with features like speed wobble, the need to actually pump in the ramp to maintain momentum, and the complete lack of stat points and abilities that usually mark certain characters out as better than others. All this points to a skateboarding simulator and there is more than a degree of truth to that, but SKATE currently appears to be easily accessible and should attract gamers who don't spend their weekends surfing sidewalk.

The game world itself is an expansive fictional city, based loosely on the hills of San Francisco, the smooth, open streets of Barcelona and Vancouver, the home of the 130-strong EA production team. There are no real spots; instead Balmer and his colleagues have created a place that demands a little more player creativity than the line-riddled worlds of Tony Hawk. Rather than leaping across the level in a chain of flips and grinds, SKATE forces you to look for the best spot and work hard to link the vast areas.

Even at the current early stage of development and with the basic suburban skatepark of the hands-on preview, the game is stunning to look at and the movement of the skateboarders is as yet unparalleled. A combination of motion capture and physics wizardry has resulted in player characters that fall, move and even correct misjudgements of balance with cinematic precision.

Tricks are pulled off in a more natural way than button combos

The camera follows you low to the ground as if you are being filmed by a following rider, and gives a great feel of skateboard videos. A particularly showy trick or smooth grind lures the camera in a little closer, resulting in the kind of lingering skate-porn shots that you'd want to capture your greatest achievements on the concrete wave.

In a move that may well become a next-gen standard, the concept of a replay function has been given a complete overhaul. You can select relevant camera angles and effects, upload your clips onto a computer, and edit them together with friends' replays. This can be done by using anything from basic consumer software to a full professional suit, before posting your masterpiece on the internet for viewing by anyone, even if they don't own the game.

Another quietly outstanding innovation comes with the goals and challenges that map your progress through the game. Like Hawk, a free roaming structure provides a mix of varied tasks which open the game to you, but in this case many of them can be triggered anywhere, allowing you choose a favourite spot for a tricky goal, rather than being anchored to a starting point.

It is true that there are still some bugs and issues to iron out but even the early preview code was very exciting and extremely hard to put down. Unless some drastic changes happen, SKATE is looking very nice indeed, and is assured to become a standard for skateboarders and gamers, as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was seven years ago.