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Video Game Review | 'Skate' successfully kicks 'Tony Hawk' monopoly with new online capabilities

Skate is a fresh, original look at a genre long dominated by Tony Hawk games: open world pro skating. Featuring a number of new game concepts and deep online integration, Skate brings long-absent, much-needed competition to the digital skating scene.

An Xbox 360 exclusive, Skate is heavily immersed in Xbox Live functionality. For example, at any time during the single-player story mode, the player can begin recording his exploits. They are supposedly filmed by a cameraman who follows the avatar around for the whole game - now there's a boring job.

After recording up to a 30-second segment, the player is given the ability to edit the footage he captured and then either save it to a memory unit, or upload it to the skate.reel network. Online activity such as uploading reels and voting on the skill of others' editing is encouraged via the game's achievements, about a third of which are for some sort of live community participation.

The game's most innovative feature is the mechanics by which the player performs tricks. Unlike most skating games to date that require pushing buttons in fast sequences to hit complex tricks, Skate aims to let the player perform tricks by using the 360 controller's right stick to mimic the movement of the skateboard for any given trick. Thus, an ollie is performed by pushing the right stick down, and then flicking it up; a nollie is similar, but the stick is pushed up first and flicked down.

While this system is not as intuitive as the game's ad campaign indicates it is, it is quite reliable once learned. The visceral satisfaction of seeing what happens on screen look exactly like what you just felt yourself do is much more rewarding than rapidly tapping a sequence of As, Bs, and Xs to pull off tricks.

While the right stick controls the board, the left stick controls the skater himself in midair. This ends up feeling incredible, but the game ruins some of the immersion by letting the skater frequently stay on his board even if the player doesn't line him up at what would be a "landable" angle with the ground. In fact, it seems it takes something close to only a 90- or 270-degree rotation in order to actually be knocked off the board. Otherwise, the avatar just wobbles back and forth and loses most of his momentum.

On the topic of falling, however, the game provides endless hours of amusement with its total rag-doll collision system. This is no longer the impressive technical feature in this day and age that it was when Half-Life 2 launched, but the hilarity of seeing the skater fly through the air and tumble off of concrete is still worth noting. There are some great videos out there of funny crashes, as any Google search for "Skate game crash" will indicate.

Since this is the first skating game that is exclusively next-generation, the graphics are worth noting. First of all, the game looks amazing. It is enjoyable to look at, even after playing it for an hour or two, and not all open-world city based games can boast that. It falls victim, however, to a common flaw in "next gen" games: The designers decided to make everything in the game shiny, to show off how much bloom their engine could use.

This is not necessary, realistic or impressive - in fact, it's just annoying, and detracts from immersion. A little bit of bloom in the background of a canyon of skyscrapers makes sense: it represents the atmospheric distortion of sun coming through dirty city air. But sidewalks are not mirrored surfaces, and to display them as such is a bit ridiculous.

Skate is certainly not the only game to fall into this trap, and luckily, in a skateboarding game, it detracts relatively little from presentation. One is already suspending disbelief to think that a man could survive thousands on thousands of high-velocity encounters with concrete; it's not too much further to accept a slightly surreal visual quality of that man's environment. Still, at some point in "next gen" graphics, designers are going to have to stop substituting shows of technical force for actual artistic direction, and really make things look believable and realistic.

Another interesting aspect of Skate is the preponderance of product placement in the game. Nearly every major skating clothing line is available for the character to wear. While this may be attractive to people who actually are hardcore skaters and deck their real selves out in such clothes, it simply serves as a bombardment of transparent advertising to the average game player who is not capable of supernatural feats of flight using only a small flat piece of wood. This continues the trend of in-game advertising, a movement in which companies as big as Microsoft, Sony and Google have all invested.

Whether or not advertising is accepted in the long run as an in-game phenomenon will largely depend on how well integrated it is into game worlds. At least in Skate, the designers succeed at making most of the product placement make sense, and at keeping it from intruding on actual game play.

All things considered, this is a solid, A-plus freshman endeavor into the pro skating video game world from the EA Black Box studio in Canada. Whether or not the Skate team can keep future installments as novel and engaging as this title is yet to be seen, but if for skate-game-fanatics with Xbox 360s, this is definitely a title to check out.