Sharing My Personal Bubble With Bigass Corporations

It's not very comforting to know that I'm paying fifty bucks a year to share my gaming information with who knows who.

I rented "skate." a few weeks ago, played it a bit... never really got into it because of its unusual controls and lack of automatic motion.

I finally logged into my hotmail account which is tied to my Xbox Live Gamertag... which I otherwise don't use. Usually I'm just there to clean out the inbox ever month or so.

There among the Microsoft newsletters and viagra spam was an email from EA, thanking me for registering my copy of skate with them.

Um, yeah. You're welcome.

EA will probably take this as an agreement for them to set up a facility on my lawn.

However, they did send a game tip:
To execute a Coffin, hold both grab buttons and the brake button at the same time.

I didn't even know there was a brake button. I never went fast enough to use it.

Skating Backwards

I spent the past couple days with the new Tony Hawk game... not very impressed. And I really liked the previous one, Project 8.

The one unforgivable oversight to this new game: no female skaters. I've had basically the same green haired female skater since Tony Hawk 4, and now she's M.I.A. This brings the chances of getting my girlfriend to play the game with me down to zero.

(Okay, the dreaded awful story mode in American Wasteland didn't allow for women skaters either, but that game had a totally separate Classic Mode which did. Ironically, I loved the Classic Mode on that game, which had been my least favorite aspect before. But that game had full co-op Classic Mode, and was terrific fun. So, of course, they didn't put that in any other game.)

This game doesn't add much of anything. It continues expanding on the "Nail" modes, which just slows the whole game down. I play Tony Hawk to do quick tricks and go sailing along at breakneck speed (and crashing horribly into concrete). If they want to breathe new life into the game, they need to focus on the atmosphere. Mainly graphics. Since Project 8, the cities and bodies look nice, but faces look horrifying. What disease is Tony Hawk dying of in this game? His sickly face tells all.

Let's see some beautiful weather effects. More dramatic lighting... make day & night times that really make a difference. Let's see some interactive debris that actually hangs around... right now you're always smashing through fences and walls, which magically disappear.

How about storyline choices that actually affect the gameplay? Remembering back to the "Underground" games... they'd give you a choice of what team to sign up with, but you'd still end up on the same team as Bam, and you're still going to Russia. Where's the replay value? Why not build a team that will get you different places? Then you can play again and try something new. And maybe the second time through, you have to face off against the final boss... the skater you created and took to the top last time through! It'd be a better option than just not playing for 11 months while waiting for the next game to come out.

I did play the other skateboarding game, "skate." Wasn't thrilled with that, either. My big complaint there was there is no continuous forward motion, like in Tony Hawk. You have to manually activate every kick start in the game, which can cause getting up a tiny curb a big annoyance if you start too close. This is a video game, give me some automation, please.

Oh, and it was too hard to break my pelvis.

As aggravating as skate was, I do want to go back and play some more. Just to see if I'd enjoy it after a while.

But, back to Tony Hawk's Proving Ground...

I've actually played the Guitar Hero III demo on the disc more than I played the Tony Hawk game. Am I the only one that is freaked out by the huge mouth on the lead singer?

There's really nothing much else to say about the new Tony Hawk game. You know what you're getting. Unless you're expecting to play your long-time female skater.