Skate Updated Hands-On

Do you remember your first time on a skateboard? The awkward wobble as you tried to maintain your balance on your too-soft trucks? The sense that any speed was too much speed until you got your feet beneath you? Or how about the time you nailed your first ollie and realized you'd only scraped the surface of what was possible? With EA's upcoming Skate--a challenger to the long-standing dominance of Activision's Tony Hawk series--the developer is looking to redefine the skate game genre with a game that--just like your real first time on the board--feels a bit awkward at first but, with some practice, opens up the more you play it. We had a chance to see an updated build of the game at a recent EA pre-E3 press event and found that it's coming along just fine.

Though there are moments of pure balls-to-the-wall skating speed in Skate, we found our bearings in the tamer, more newb-friendly skate park in the fictional city of San Vanelona. We've seen the park in previous looks at the game but, in our latest look, the park and the surrounding areas look more alive than ever. The promised pedestrian and automobile traffic was present in the areas outside the park, giving more movement and life to the surrounding areas, while also presenting your skater with new obstacles to avoid as you zoom along. We also saw new animations, including new gestures from your skater--such as the thumbs up--which are controlled with the directional pad.

Thanks to some impressive physics, the game's skating engine feels authentic from the second you lay the board down. For one thing, you have to manually kick to move your skater forward, for another as you move the analog sticks left and right, you'll notice your skater shifting his weight subtly in order to move the trucks and turn the board. Moving forward with the left stick will cause your skater to move his weight forward slightly, giving you some extra speed as you move along. In addition, how you set up your board will affect how your skateboard and the road beneath it respond to your commands. You'll be able to choose softer, stickier tires for more grip, or harder tires for more speed; you'll also be able to adjust your trucks either softer (for more responsive turning) or harder (for a tighter, sturdier board during downhill jaunts).

The game's single-player showcase will be the career mode, where you'll be able to take your created skater up from four-wheeled nobody to magazine cover star and beyond. In fact, you'll gauge much of your early-game success by publication of your photos in two of the biggest skate rags around--Thrasher and Skateboard. Starting out, you'll be lucky to find your pics in the back of the magazine; as you progress, your goal will be to move up through the pages, eventually landing on the cover. From there, you'll be invited to compete in the X Games. To progress, you'll need to compete in a number of different challenges, the first few of which will be leading you through the game with simplified missions such as staying close to a target skater, or getting a trick photographed and published in one of the aforementioned magazines.

As you make your way through the game, you'll encounter different missions in the various areas that make up the fictional city of San Vanelona. There will be your standard trick missions, as well as races on the speedier tracks, and many more. The different mission types will be scattered throughout the different areas of the city and will be affected by the geography of that part of town. For example, in the downhill sections of town, you'll need to do your best to avoid traffic whether skating your way through traffic (or lugeing on your back, one of the cooler tricks you can do).

With such as an emphasis on stylish skating, one of the more exciting aspects of the game is the ability to record and share your replays with others. According to producers, you'll be able to back up about a minute's worth of gameplay, record as much of that as you like, and add a number of special effects, choose from a number of camera angles (currently there are cameras above and on either side of the skater, as well as on the front and tail of the board, possibly with more optional camera angles in the future), and even change the playback speed as you go. The file rendered will be in Flash format and available to download from EA's Skate Web site, which will include additional editing tools. While you won't be able to add music to your clip from your Xbox hard drive, there's nothing stopping you from doing so once the clip is on your personal PC.

In addition to the single-player career, Skate will include a number of other play modes including freeskate, party play, tutorial, and online play. You'll be able to skate together with a friend online, and there will be ranked and unranked challenges you can compete in. In addition, the online community will play a big role in the Skate replay videos, as players will be able to vote for their favorite clips. We look forward to seeing more of the game in the coming weeks as we get closer to its September release.