Tony Hawk's Proving Ground - hands-on

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Get some in-depth info on the different skating career paths

Aug 15, 2007

We got our first hands-on time with the soon to be released Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, and after getting more than our fair helping of asphalt to chew on, we handed the controllers sheepishly back to the nice people at Activision. We were a bit out of practice since the last few iterations of the game haven't really given us much reason to upgrade our older version, but Activisionwas kind enough to giveus a look at what the game looks like in the hands of players who have a bit of a handle on the controls.

The good news is that, experienced or not, the game is good, and the controls are handling smoothly (even though we may have claimed otherwise during our hands-on time). Slow-motion, analogue controlled Nail the Grab and Nail the Manual have been added because of the popularity of Nail the Trick mode introduced in Project 8. The real focus of the game this time, however, is getting to build your own skater from the ground up.

As we told you with our lastpreview from E3, characters can mold their abilities to fit any combination of three skater styles, developing their skills as either a career, hardcore or rigger skater. Now we've learned there will be another collection of ambient goaltypes, called street goals. We saw our skater make a bit of progress with street goals after activating an arcade machine and beating a game of Hawk-Man (collecting dots kinda like Pac-Man, but on a skateboard, and no ghosts because ghosts don't skate).