I was a believer before the initial release of the first ‘Skate’ game… I had played the Tony Hawk franchise for a long long time, and understood it had reached the end of the line when they started moving away from the skateboarding aspect of it (I think Underground may have been the last one I played, and 3 might have been the last one I enjoyed). Skate appeared to be bringing a more authentic and realistic approach to the genre, and I was fully on-board.

Skate delivered on the promise, creating a full and authentic world to skate in, obviously there were areas that were super tuned to be skate-able, but some of my favorite spots in Skate and Skate 2 were simple little sets of stairs just off in the middle of nowhere, that aren’t unlike something you might stumble upon in real life.

For example:

This leads me perfectly into my next point, Skate 2 is Web 2.0 in video game format… I don’t believe there is anything like it… they’ve created this whole social networking framework around the game. You create, and edit videos, pictures, spots, and publish them to your profile, you can view them from their website, they can be rated by the community, everything you would expect from a web 2.0 website… And they only plan to expand from there. Creating brands, teams, and parks, only expands that sense of community. It is a truly commendable effort, even if it failed, but it has worked very very very well. And in case you’re really interested, heres a link to my profile on Skate.reel

The video below is taken from the Skate site, and it outlines how they’re encouraging user creativity with  some new features in Skate 3.

The Skate franchise lives and dies by it’s mechanic, the skating is awesome, and they create environments to enjoy that mechanic, and thats it. I have no qualms about picking up the controller, and just skating around SanVan for hours, no objectives, no scores, just skating… I think they’ve only added a trick or 2 to this version, dark sliders for sure (my favorite). To my recollection there is only one other game that has sold me on this sort of open world mechanic alone, and believe it or not it was Spiderman 2… I spent hours upon hours in that game web-slinging because it was fun…