E3: Tony Hawk: Ride Preview

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By this point, the one thing you can say about Activision with a certain degree of confidence is that the company knows its peripherals, so it's probably wise to give it the benefit of the doubt that its latest chunk of sexy plastic will do what you need it to when it finally arrives later this year. It's also probably wise to give it the benefit of the doubt because Activision's so staggeringly rich by this point, it could easily dispatch a team of killer robots to finish you off with gold-plated rocket grenades if it doesn't like your attitude.

Understandably then, it was the peripheral that hogged most of the limelight at Ride's unveiling, while the game itself took something of a backseat. From what we've seen, however, Ride is visually a move towards slightly more cartoonish ground, employing - if not cel-shading - bolder, flatter textures, and chunky, stylised in-game models. Glowing trails erupt from arms and legs when skaters pull off something slick, and the HUD sprays a lot of highlighter pen neon over its furniture. Some will doubtless prefer the rumpled slacker realism of Skate, but, trundling over the sunny concrete of the LA Riverbed level, the latest Tony Hawk looks pleasantly summery.

Controls aside, it seems the new developer Robomodo isn't adding a great deal of new ideas to the core gameplay on this outing, however, its main focus lying in splitting the key elements up for the sake of accessibility, offering three types of event across every setting, with separate trick, speed, and challenge sessions available.

Flashy visual effects suggest that someone at Robomodo's been watching those iPod advertss.

All of them seem to make the most of some likeably freeform environments, and dialling the overall complexity back somewhat is probably a good idea, as, checking out footage of the board in action, even Hawk himself looks ever so slightly wobbly at times, suggesting that you're going to want to move your Henry Moore sculptures away from the TV for safety's sake, even before you start trying to chain tricks together.

Until we've stepped on the board ourselves, and seen a bit more of the actual game, it's hard to judge how many people lured away to EA's upstart will be tempted back to Tony Hawk this time. One thing's for certain, however: Ride's peripheral implies that sports videogames primarily aspire to the closest possible mimicry of the real-world activity. That may be largely correct, but in the process, such an assumption possibly shuts out those who were drawn to previous skating games predominantly because of the ability to master a clever and satisfying controller layout.