• Posted December 30th, 2008 at 14:21 EDT by Steven Williamson
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(continued from previous page) ...by pressing ‘triangle’ and drag objects, such as ramps, benches, picnic tables and rails across the environment to create your own skate lines. By jumping off our board, walking up to objects and pressing ‘R1’ we were able to place objects practically anywhere across the city and use them in conjunction with existing ‘nailed down’ street furniture in order to create multiple objects to trick off. Once you set your skate line you need to set a score for the course and you can then, if you wish, upload it to the servers so that the Skate community can try and beat your high score. If they do, they’ll own your track. Not all objects can be moved in the city, but there are more than enough to ensure that they'll be some challenging skate lines created and some fierce competition in the online arena.

There are also a number of challenges where moving objects in the environment comes in extremely handy. What better way to achieve a high score trick challenge than by moving objects around to create the perfect skate line? In one objective that we completed, we met up with Danny Way and followed him around some of the craziest spots and drops across the city where his challenge required us to creatively use movable objects to discover secret paths.

Aside from the wide variety of objectives offered, user-generated content and customization plays a big part in Skate 2. Not only can you now customize the look of your skater before you hit the streets, but by using a web-based graphics editing tool you can go a stage further and personalize the skater by creating your own graphics, which can then be imported into your game profile. This gives you the freedom to change the look of hats, shirt and boards in the game, a feature which, although we've yet to test out, looks set to give Skate that personal touch. There’s no doubt that EA will have its work cut out to ensure that offensive and copyright-infringing images don’t make their way into the game, but we can look forward to seeing some creative efforts and bold statements as gamers bring color onto the streets of New San Venelona with their imaginative creations.

The Skate.Reel feature has also been improved from the last outing with a more advanced video editing functionality that allows you to be more creative with camera angles and gives you more visual control over the footage that you take. Keeping in with the community spirit that EA is trying to uphold, there’s the option to upload and share photos and videos with the community which can be viewed online.

Customization and user generated content is all well and good but if the actual skateboarding sucks then it’s all been a big waste of time. Despite a few glitches though, which seem to occur when pulling off one-foot tricks (we're assured that these will be ironed out before the final build), EA Black Box has successfully built upon its right stick-wiggling FlickIt system which we enjoyed in the first outing. Now things are a bit more complicated, but even more enjoyable and challenging, thanks to a wide variety of new moves and variations of tricks that you can pull off. Multiple button presses are used more frequently, which in conjunction with the triggers that control your left and right hands, and the face buttons which control your feet, there’s a lot of new moves to get your head around. Pulling off the likes of a double grab followed by a coffin, for example, requires you to press ‘Square’ or ‘Cross’ to do a Boneless or a Fastplant, pull down the left stick to powerslide, then hold both triggers for the double grab, and end by pressing ‘Cross’ and ‘Square’ simultaneously to do a Coffin. Initially, we spent plenty of time chewing concrete whilst trying to string together some of the more complicated moves, but it didn't take too long to grips with some of the new tricks and thanks to fast response times and the fluidity of stringing these tricks together, there's a nice sense of achievement and gratification when you pull of some of the more complicated moves.

The added moves and the upgrade of ... (continued on next page)