Skate 2

The game itself was ok, I liked the realism that went into it. The controls were hard to get used to if you were a fan of the Tony Hawk franchise of games, the trick system was terribly unforgiving, and you had to line up all your ollies and grinds yourself or you just crashed to the ground. After a while, you could actually start doing tricks without thinking too much about what you were doing and it was kind of fun. The game took a while to beat 100%, longer than it took me to get to 100% on Grand Theft Auto 4, and it was far more frustrating as there were some missions where you'd do it for hours on end and get no closer to completing. The ollie-on-a-planter-and-land-on-a-manual -> ollie-up-onto-a-high-planter-while-still-in-a-manual-and-land-on-a-manual -> ollie-off-the-planter-while-still-in-a-manual-then-ollie-onto-another-planter-and-land-on-a-manual -> ollie-over-a-gap-while-still-in-a-manual-and-land-on-a-manual -> ollie-off-the-planter-while-still-in-a-manual photo shoot was retarded hard. I can't remember how many hours it took me to do that. Another one was the nose-slide to tail-slide over a fountain one with the french guy attempting to tell you what trick you need to do photo shoot. It sounds much easier than it actually is because I never memorized, nor mastered, the trick system. So prior to attempting this photo shoot, the only nose/tail slides I did was totally by accident. I also cheated on the 2 pros you have to play horse against because I simply wasn't good enough with the trick system to win that one and by that time, I just wanted to be done with the game and never look at it again.

The online play was also just ok. The challenges was kind of fun but it never really required any sort of teamwork, and if it did, there was no way to communicate it to other skaters unless you had a headset or something (which I don't). I stopped doing that pretty quickly. Also, it was made much less fun because I hadn't mastered the trick system.

I did record a couple of videos, though. It's pretty cool that you can record videos with your PS3 then upload it to the Skate 2 website seemlessly. Most of them were random glitches that I had ran into as I was playing the game, a few were actually tricks that I decided to save because I thought they looked cool. There probably would be more of the latter if I had discovered the video editing tool earlier in the game.

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