Man, that subject is a travesty of grammar. 

I remember when I played my first Tony Hawk skateboard game. I remember feeling a little frustrated.

Blame it on my youthful hamfistedness or on my lack of street knowledge, but for the life of me I couldn’t manage to string together tricks as easily as I would have liked. The idea behind each stage was that you had to reach a certain target of points before you could progress to the next level. My method of racking up points was to get big air, spin around as much as I could and hope that I land in the right direction. Either that or find a nice, long, continuous grind and watch the points oh-so-slowly accumulate.

But it was unique, different and frustratingly addictive. It was a nice way to get at a market that was relatively untapped at the time, and it became one of the more popular titles to be associated with skating. Activision enjoyed the jewel in its crown. Now the lumbering juggernaut that is EA wants a piece of the street style action. Since parkour games have a ways to go yet, they may as well crack into the skateboard game market to take on Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground.

skate. is typically grungy; the use of rough, dirty stencil art and the muted colours suit the urban environs. It makes use of the right thumbstick through the "Flickit" system, which allows you to do skateboard tricks by moving the stick in certain patterns. Pulling it down moves the skater into a crouch, and flicking it up will propel him into an ollie. Flicking it to either side will initiate a heelflip, and pulling it around the side will do a shuvit. It is extremely similar to the punching mechanic in the Fight Night series. The triggers allow you to hold your board with your hand, the left stick moves the player, and the right stick moves the board. Manuals are much more forgiving to pull off and you can launch into one with ease. The layout was well thought out, and obviously tried to shy away from the "one-button-trick" philosphy.

You still do have to skate for "points", but it’s much less about trying to explore and find hidden letters, and more about pulling off specific tricks for photographers, skate comps and for replay footage. One of the more common tools in games nowadays is the replay option, and skate. has one of the more detailed ones out there. It allows you to set markers, cut, crop and apply filters. You can also play through your finer (or more painful) moments in slow motion or faster tempo by manipulating the thumbstick.

The game has a very GTA-ish feel to it. Missions are represented as a giant Artliner squiggle hanging in the air, cutting down into the shape of an arrow hovering above someone’s head. I don’t think that there will be a cheesy backstory, which can be a good thing (am I the only one that thinks Marc Ecko’s Getting Up was a bit too "Oh Captain, my Captain"?). If you don’t feel like taking on missions, then you just keep skating; however, taking on missions and challenges can teach you new tricks.

Unfortunately, the demo will only let you play for 30 minutes at a time. It’s a respectable amount, if you think about it.

I don’t know if I love skateboarding (or EA) that much to lump money together for an entire game about it. But it’s surprisingly good fun, and the demo itself will probably keep me occupied for a couple of days.

I watched my first episode tonight, and it’s not too bad. It held my attention up until the end, at least.

There were some parts that nagged me about it, like the bizarre qtr. circle + A segment. I didn’t know if it was meant to be funny, but I had one eyebrow up by the end of it.

And finally, it feels a bit too much like an extended video podcast. Not that I’ve actually watched one. But it has this condensed, hurried, slapdash formula to it. Chuck in a couple of reviews and then assign it a score from 6-10. To fill in the other minutes, add in a news headline segment, throw in a feature piece like "What your Avatar says about you", and shoot a suitably nerdy interview.

What I would like to see is:

• More reviews. Extended reviews are nice, but they eat into too much time. A Twitter-like segment of short, sharp reviews for other lesser known / mild impact titles would widen title exposure and hold my attention.
• Feature pieces should be more relevant to our interests. I don’t really want to see a Dolly-style story along the lines of "What key config suits you? Take our quiz and find out!" I’d rather see things like what happens behind the scenes in games development. I’d rather see big issues being tackled, like games classification laws and the future of the local game industry. I’d rather see stories on how professional gamers rose to the top and how successful companies went from bust to bigshot and vice versa. I want to see how international markets and what international gamers are like, and what to expect on the horizon in terms of software and hardware. You can even mix this in with the news headlines, I’m not fussed.
• Interviews are good. However, interviewing Stan Lee may be the wrong course (although it was a great effort to secure it). I’d rather see something along the lines of aforementioned professional gamers, developers pimping their next-gen titles, acclaimed producers of successful franchises telling us what makes them so successful, and celebrities like the makers of Red vs. Blue or Gary’s Mod or something. Something relevant - not "Oh, Stan Lee made Spider-Man, and he’s a comic book character, and chances are gamers like reading comics and manga, and games nowadays are based on comic book movies, so let’s get him on the show".
• Make funnier machinima. Hire comic writers that need to research Internet and gamer culture if you must. Go to 4chan. Go to Destructoid. Hell, go to freakin’ Gaia. Take the piss out of someone and get pixels to animate it.