Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games are legend and created an entire genre, which is why someone wants to make a documentary about them.

Today is the final day of independent operation for 20-year-old games studio Neversoft, best known for its work developing Tony Hawk's titles and later Guitar Hero games.

Neversoft boss Joel Jewett has said the studio will finally walk away from the Tony Hawk's series it created and nurtured to worldwide success.

After a joyous yuletide spent playing Naughty Dog's supreme Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, it's back to the frontlines of the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 console war for this reporter, with the latest battery of cross-platform confrontations. You know the score by now: impartial criticism on each multi-format release is the name of the game, the aim being to supplement the original Eurogamer reviews with additional commentary relevant to each version of the game, with gameplay the primary concern.

As is the norm with our face-off comparison features, each game feature is supplemented with a range of ultra-clean screengrabs losslessly extracted from the HDMI ports of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Elite. A Digital Foundry HD capture station is used to acquire every last pixel output by the consoles at full 24-bit precision, with the unit calibrated to full-range RGB and both systems set up likewise. As 1080p performance is so variable on PlayStation 3, we've included screenshots of this video mode in action where applicable and how the results compare to the Xbox 360's in-built GPU scaler on the same titles.

So... the games then. A colossal array of wares to get through in what is the biggest face-off feature yet; 12 titles that between them rate a 'not bad at all' 7.5/10 when their Eurogamer review scores are taken as an average.

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Once upon a time, reviewing handheld versions of popular video and PC games was a bit like inviting your old friends round only to discover they all secretly hate you and are recent burns victims. These days, though, the DS is big business to games publishers, so surely they're trying a bit harder. We tracked down five recent examples of "and on DS" to find out.

The Simpsons Game

Games that make fun of games can't really afford to be bad themselves. That was the problem The Simpsons Game had on telly consoles, and the same's true on the DS. Except this time the game bits are worse. (So, off to a bad start.)

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Activision has worked out how to sign up for YouTube and is giving away GBP 1000 to people who create the best skater videos to mark the release of Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. The tagline is: "Every skater has a story. Create yours."

Tony Hawk's Project 8 was like a fresh summer's morning, the last of the dew glistening on the luscious blades of grass, a warm sun emerging above the distant hills, while puffy white clouds dotted a rich blue sky. Through its fields and meadows you gaily skipped, pausing to pluck a large, happy-faced daisy and weave it into your hair, before busting a sick flip-trick off a convenient nearby quarter pipe in gorgeous slow motion.

Proving Ground is a cloudy, early Winter's day, with the worst of Autumn's drizzle over, but before it's become snugglingly cold. There's a fog on the horizon, grime on the streets, and a weighty cloud of melancholy hanging over all below.

It's peculiar that Proving Ground is so much less of a game than Project 8. Because if you look at what it offers - the impressive list of features, both those evolved and those new - it should by rights be a step forward. It is, however, a sort of sit down and stare at the wall. Added to the glorious Nail The Trick mode is a Nail The Grab, and a Nail The Manual. Then on top, there's the new Aggro Kick to offer speed boosts, Skate Checking for beating up innocents, Bowl Skating for old-skool Dogtown vibes, as well as Rigging - letting you manipulate your environment, build ramps and rails, and film it all, and finally the ability to get off your board and climb the cities to look for exciting new gaps. Oh, and the skate house. Oh again, and the video editing. Phew, eh? What a lot.

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Sony has updated the PlayStation 3 Store with five new downloadable games, a pair of overdue demos and downloadable content for Folklore and MotorStorm.

Would you believe that Tony Hawk will be 40 years old next year? You wouldn't if you'd seen his performance at this year's Leipzig Games Convention, where he wowed the crowd with some of his bestest skateboarding stunts and didn't look like he was getting on a bit at all.

Tony Hawk has finally finished work on the demo for his ninth game, and released it today on Xbox Live [it's possible you've misunderstood - Ed].

EA bigwig Steve Schnur reckons music in games influences youngsters more than other media, like radio, GamesIndustry.biz reports. That's probably because they spend all their time talking and cut records off before they're finished.

You can't walk down a virtual street these days without some young hooligan's skateboarding game tearing around in front of you, probably mugging old ladies and eating their drugs I shouldn't wonder. And it's only going to get worse, with EA's Skate imminent, and now news that Mr Tony Hawk has once more been hard at work in his attic, coding another in his long-running series.

Activision has revealed it will be sneaking a Guitar Hero III demo into the Xbox 360 version of Tony Hawk's Proving Ground.

Activision has announced details of the next game in its long-running skateboarding series, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. The title will be released on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii and DS in autumn this year.