Released on 14/05/2010

• Skate 3 Review

  Familiar yet new

  For those that have played its predecessors, Skate 3 is structurally the same, offering a map filled with mission icons which you work your way through to open up new objectives like tournaments. This means you'll be comfortable jumping board first into an experience that instantly feels familiar, but you'll also be happy to find that refinements to the already satisfying control system and realistic gameplay don't take long to become apparent.

  New boundaries

  But if you're new to the franchise you'll want to head to the game's Skate School, a welcoming and essential tutorial space that explains basic moves and even allows you to freeze your skater mid-air in order to experiment. Controls centre on the right analogue stick, which is moved like a board itself, with flicks and rotations used to perform the likes of grabs and flips, while the shoulder buttons mimic individual limbs to alter tricks.

  Skate 3 introduces the best setting in the series yet, the all-new skater's paradise of Port Carverton.

  Skate 3 introduces the best setting in the series yet, the all-new skater's paradise of Port Carverton. You'll complete objectives on or offline, in various solo or team-based battles across the urban landscape, which is littered with ideally situated ledges, rails and ramps.

  The game's career mode focuses on creating your own skating brand, including a logo and associated clothing. You progress by passing challenges that build your reputation, enabling you to sell skateboards and enlist new team members, which are either computer controlled or real human players.

  User-created content

  Career progression is persistent whether playing online or offline, meaning there's nothing holding you back from jumping into a challenge when a friend invites you to do so. This also unlocks team-based objectives that you can film using the Skate Reel feature, which enables you and friends to make videos of yourselves in action.

  Arguably the most fun lies in creating your own skate park.

  But arguably the most fun lies in creating your own skate park, using simple drag-and-drop controls to place objects into the world. The intuitive Skate Create suite of tools not only allows you to make custom content for private use but also lets you share it with friends and the wider Skate 3 community. In addition, a new game and web social network dubbed Skate Feed lets you keep tabs on your team-mates' actions, whether they're posting movies or they've designed a fresh logo.

  Full season

  Skate 3 isn't a pick up and play title designed to be completed once and discarded when it's finished. It's an ever-evolving game to dip in and out of at will, whether alone or with friends. For newcomers it's the most accessible title in the series to date and therefore the best place to begin. And while it may not offer a load of revolutionary additions for veterans, experienced players will appreciate a range of tweaks that make it the most fully featured Skate title to date.

  GAME's Verdict

  

  • Great creative tools.
  • Loads of new community features.
  • Welcoming to newcomers but deep enough for experts.

  

  • Skate 2 owners will find it rather familiar.
  • Singleplayer isn't as rewarding as online play.
  • Still tricky (no pun intended) to fully master.

  Review by: Tom 'Boarder' Ivan
  Version Tested: PS3
  Review Published: 11.05.10

  Published: 11/05/2010

• Skate 3 Review

  Boarders' heaven

  Skateboarding games are all about the tricks, and Skate 3 has plenty of them. In the year since Skate 2 came out, the developers at Black Box have tweaked their "Flick-It" stunt system to give experienced players even more ways to flip, twist, and grab their board. But the game is still accessible enough for novice players to jump in and feel like skater gods (with a little practice).

  The setting is Port Carverton, a city where it's always a perfect day to skate. The terrain is full of ramps, railings, and whatnot to help you show off your skills. And you'll need to show off. Your character has just started a new skateboard company, see, and your goal is to sell as many boards as possible. To get your name out there to the buying public, you have to complete challenges.

  There's a huge selection of different challenge modes to suit players' varied tastes. At the simplest level, the film and photo challenges simply ask you to complete a couple tricks that look good for the cameras-jump over that shark in the town square, for instance. The action gets more intense in "jam" competitions, where you're stacked up against a few competitors to see who can rack up the most trick points within a time limit. Those opponents are computer-controlled in the single-player campaign, of course, but most of the jams can be played online, too.
  

  Flick it to trick it

  Another way to get some online bragging rights is to climb the leaderboard on the Own The Lot challenges. These missions focus in on one tiny portion of sprawling Port Carverton, and the goal is simple-do the craziest, highest-point-value trick you possibly can in that spot. Trying to "own" a spot can be frustrating at first, as you'll have to retry dozens (maybe hundreds) of times to squeeze out every point you can from these often brutally difficult exercises. The satisfying payoff, though, is in achieving perfection.

  Then again, not everyone can be perfect. If you're a glutton for punishment, step into the Hall of Meat, a series of challenges where you try to fail in the most spectacular way possible by launching yourself off a jump and bailing from your board. The worse you hurt yourself, the more points you get. The controls here can get a little fidgety-you have to push a whole mess of buttons all at once just to bail-but hey, breaking every bone in your body is a messy enterprise.

  The "Flick-it" system has you perform jumps by flicking the right analog stick-flicking in a different direction results in a different trick. It's the trademark of the Skate series, and it's easier on the hands than the button-mashing style of the Tony Hawk series.
  

  Share the love

  The downside is that it can be hard to zero in on an exact trick, given how many different moves are packed into one analog stick, but most challenges can be completed with a variety of tricks. (There's often a bonus for using specific stunts to finish a challenge, but it's not necessary to finish the game-more of an added feature for the experts.)

  Once you master the trick system, you can cut some footage together in the replay editor and upload it to EA's website-without having to pay extra for advanced camera features like Skate 2. And Skate 3 beefs up its user-generated content creds with Skate.Park, where you can build your own skating mecca and, naturally, share it with other players online.

  But this game is just as much fun offline as it is on, because while competing with your friends is fun, Skate 3 is really about the competition with yourself. There's a lot to master, and getting comfortable on the board takes work.

  The journey toward skating godliness has enough fun and variety, though, that Skate 3 leaves no doubt that it has replaced the Tony Hawk series on the skateboarding-game throne.

  

  Sick
  + Huge variety of challenges.
  + A lot to explore in Port Carverton.
  + Robust online features.

  Comedown
  - Unforgivingly difficult.
  - Steep learning curve.
  - No real multiplayer.
  

• You got your Dead Space in my Skate 3

  You got your Dead Space in my Skate 3

  Okay - this is a weird one. According to Eurogamer, EA is offering Skate 3 owners the chance to unlock Isaac Clarke, the hulking engineer hero from Dead Space, in their game.

  Yep: that means you can grind around the sun-baked plazas of Port Carverton decked out in a deep space mining get-up complete with stompy magnetic boots and face mask.

  Skate 3 came out last week to pretty much universal acclaim. The new setting provides some of the best open-world skating the series has yet scene, online integration makes it incredibly easy to gang up with your friends to form crews and take on challenges together, and there's a new series of difficulty settings to allow newbies to get their heads around EA's acclaimed Flickit control system, which uses the analogue sticks to approximate board movement.

  Dead Space, meanwhile, has been out for a while, and sees Isaac Clarke exploring a huge dilapidated spaceship that's empty except for some hideous Necromorph aliens. It's incredibly scary. There: we warned you.

  The code you'll need to access Clarke is DEADSPACETOO. Skate 3 is available for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

• EA making all Online Pass material free

  It wasn't so long ago that EA announced it was ditching its unpopular Online Pass system, which required players buying a preowned game to pay an additional fee to access multiplayer features or other in-game content.

  "As we discontinue Online Pass for our new EA titles, we are also in the process of eliminating it from all our existing EA titles as well," the publisher told Eurogamer. "We heard the feedback from players and decided to do away with Online Pass altogether."

  Apparently the change will be seen first in some EA Sports games, with the Online Pass prompt quietly vanishing. For other games, the Online Pass will remain but will be downloadable for free. The process is expected to take several weeks until all Online Pass content is available to everyone.

  Already, the Online Pass for games such as Battlefield Bad Company 2, Skate 3, Bulletstorm, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Medal of Honor and Shift 2 Unleashed have dropped their price tag. Some exclusive DLC is also free. Dragon Age: Origins' The Stone Prisoner, Dragon Age 2's Black Emporium and Mass Effect 2's Cerberus Network Pass are now available at no cost, regardless of whether you have an original code. The downloadable version of American McGee's Alice, which was packed-in with Alice: Madness Returns, is also free of charge but needs the Madness Returns disc to run.

  So if you've been holding off on picking up any of these games preowned, now's the time to swoop!

  Published: 31/05/2013

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