Tony Hawk's Proving Ground First Impressions

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Yo, fly pad, gangsta

The Skate Lounge is a large warehouse in which you can build your own indoor skate park, with vast amounts of customisation. Another small change (fnarr) in the main game is the rewarding of money for impressive moves and completed goals.

You'll constantly be adding to your cashflow as you play, which can then be spent on items for your pad. These range from ramps and grind rails, to refrigerators and vast, wall-sized video screens on which you can play the music videos of the game's licensed bands. Once your crib is to your liking, you can then invite your online friends to come in, have a skate around, share an imaginary beer, and generally be amazed by the quality of your bling compared to their paltry efforts. (It's like MTV itself wrote that paragraph).

The Rigger's skills also boost Proving Ground's online potential. Because you can place ramps, rails and various objects anywhere you like into the game, you might create something particularly (searches through urbandictionary.com again) sick, that you want to show your (search) good chums. So connectify, and in they come, able to skate around your unique version of the game.

Finally, from my scribbled pages of "Things I Must Tell My Friend Jo About The New Version Of The Game Because She Likes Skating, And Should Probably Write About On EuroGamer Too I Suppose" (which also contains the opening legend, "NO GIRLS!" acknowledging the completely idiotic decision not to offer female player characters for no good reason, you sexist morons), is the video editing.

See if you can find Dubya practising his grinds around the corner.

Using your directorial skills (wait, skillz), you can place a camera anywhere you like, and record your antics. The resulting video works something like the motion-picture version of that camera thing in Bladerunner that could look around corners, letting you manipulate the results from any angle. Then you load it into an in-built video editing tool, that lets you chop, stretch, loop and sepia-tone it all. And this is looking remarkably complex. During our demo, they quickly knocked together a movie of a simple ollie, shown from an over-the-shoulder camera, then cutting to a slo-mo version of the leap looking up from beneath, then again rapid cutting to an overhead fast-action view, and then putting the whole thing to music. It all looked rather slick, and it gets even slicker.

Using some technology from Activision's other financial friesian, Guitar Hero, the game is able to measure how well the action of your video matches the accompanying music, and rates you on this. This seems like witchcraft to us, but we're promised it's for real. But we'll wait until we've tested it for ourselves before we really believe.

Park Love

Unrealistic? Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOKhe9k4eg4

Set in Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia, featuring real-world skate parks such as Philly's excellent Love Park, there's a much murkier tone to the game's settings. It appears more urban, and less cartoony than Project 8, and seems to be further emphasising the reality of skating, while maintaining the ludicrous, arcade impossibility of the moves. And once again, they're promising no load points, with tunnels linking the sections. This didn't work so well in Tony Hawk's 7, but apparently this time the tunnels will be entertaining skating sections of their very own. We shall see. The whole thing is 1.5 times bigger than Project 8, which was already pretty damn big to start with.

Simply because it's the same tech as the wonderful Project 8, but elaborated on in ways that appear likely to enhance, rather than bloat (with a worried eye on the muddle over career paths) enthusiasm is very high for this one. It seems like it would be hard for Neversoft to mess it up. Just someone lock Steve-O in a cage, and store it on the moon.