EA Skate. Awesome!

Those of you who know me know that I love skateboarding. Even though I've been lame the last few years and let life and everything else get in the way to where I don't skate ... the fire still burns :-)

I remember another game called Thrasher from back when Tony Hawk first came out. At the time, I really liked Thrasher better because it was a bit slower paced ... a bit more realistic. And it had this cool feature where the skater would go ragdoll any time you messed up a trick. Very fun game. But I guess Tony Hawk won that battle.

It's the age old battle between an "Arcadey" game vs. a more proper simulation. Of course, there will be people that can't stand one or the other. I for one say that there is room in the pantheon of games for both ... let's just hope that dividing the market like that keeps enough customers to continue funding both games :-)

EA Skate. captures the feeling of skating very well ... something that bothered me about Tony Hawk was that you could never truly reproduce real-life tricks like doing a trick on a pyramid from one bank to the other. Because the characters would ollie so high, they'd just completely go over the pyramid (a fatty to flatty, as it were :-P ). The physics in EA Skate actually accounts for the surface that you're going to land on and changes the skater's direction accordingly. The result is very realistic, and looks awesome.

I'll definitely be picking this up when it comes out ... and hopefully once my workload @ work dies down a bit, I expect to actually start skating again.

Random tidbit: Rob, the guy who runs http://www.skateparkoftampa.com (the best skatepark in the world), is totally a .NET geek :-)