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EA working on Skate 3?

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to, well, anyone considering the success of EA’s skate and skate 2 — Rumor circulating the web suggests that EA is hard at work on Skate 3, or at least are planning to be hard at work on the game sometime soon.

This rumor comes to us from the Epicly Trife (a site dedicated to skateboarding) twitter which reads: “I just got told ‘tonight we gotta celebrate,’ one of the bro’s got offered to be in SKATE 3.” Now assuming this bro is a pro skater, this rumor may hold some merit.

However, like always, we’ll hold final judgement until we hear word from EA themselves.

Tony Hawk: Ride priced, dated thanks to GameStop

Thanks to GameStop we now know that the latest addition to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, Tony Hawk: Ride, will be hitting store shelves on October 13th for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii.

Furthermore, the game will come bundled with the skateboard peripheral that everyone has been talking with a price point of $119.99.

Of course, this date is subject to change as GameStop has a tendancy to do that but when Tony Hawk: Ride does drop the skateboard genre will never be the same. That is, if the developers deliver because EA’s skate is sure to put up a fight to the grave.

Read (GameStop)

Skate II Game Review–Great If You’re A Skater, Still Good If You’re Not

I’ve never really understood the attraction to skating games.  You basically spend all your time rolling around on a wheeled board and trying desperately not to launch into super-special amateur tricks like the one-eighty leg breaker, the three-sixty you’ll never walk again and of course, my personal favorite, the five-forty ultra ollie kickflip into a premature death by broken neck.

And so I approached Skate 2 on my Xbox 360 with a little bit of trepidation, as I knew it was going to involve a lot of rolling around on wheeled boards and trying desperately not to kill myself.

Skate 2 takes place about five years after a series of horrible catastrophes in Skate left your home city in ruins and apparently also sent you to jail (whoa, so much for “skateboarding is not a crime”, huh guys?).  Now you’re out, but the city you left behind is not the same—five years will make a lot of changes to any town, especially one that’s just been hit by several disasters in a row.  The evil corporation (and you know that there’s got to be one in a game about skateboarders somewhere, right?) MongoCorp has taken over the revitalization effort of the ruined city, converting it into the almost-recognizable New San Vanelona, often referred to throughout the game as New San Van.  MongoCorp is willing to shell out these vast sums of cash to rebuild the city apparently so that it can institute a kind of martial law specifically targeting skateboarders, adding blocks to rails so they can’t be ground, and so on.

This is, of course, as ridiculous as stories get from a narrative sense—next month, watch for the Jenny Craig corporation to nuke and rebuild Brussels to make Belgian chocolate illegal—but the story isn’t exactly what we’re here for.

Now, I will freely admit that if you’re looking for a rail-grinding, box-crunching, trick-landing, air-grabbing good time, then indeed, Skate 2 is EXACTLY what you want.  Even I had a good deal of fun riding around on my skateboard, finding places to do tricks, and soaring into randomness.  I liked that the game put on a pretty nice simulation of speed and open-air movement on the board–I remember one crash where I’d apparently reached twenty-five miles an hour.  I liked the whole “annals of meat” system that rewarded me for doing stuff that wouldn’t even make it to MTV’s Scarred for being too graphic.  I liked the wide array of customization, and no doubt, those who enjoy skateboarding games are going to have a TOTAL blast with this game.

And if you liked the original, then you’re going to have a positive field day with the sequel.  Most of the original stuff has been kept—you’ll recognize a lot of the tricks and gestures and boards and clothes and whatnot.  The stuff that has been altered—mostly city landmarks—have been removed and replaced as would be expected according to the storyline.  In fact, some of those landmarks have been left in place, but noticeably altered.  I’ll admit, from a narrative sense their storyline is the worst kind of limping scrod but they stuck with it come hell or high water.

So basically, yes, if you’re a skater buff then you will go nuts over this game.  Frankly, even if you’re not you’ll likely still get at least a little entertainment out of this, which is great.  But if you’re not a skate buff, don’t expect much more than a rental’s worth of fun out of it.

EA Lays Off Skate, Madden Developers

EA is currently implementing its cost-cutting plan, which will see the company shed 10% of its global workforce due to the deepening recession. The latest victims of the plan are Madden developer Tiburon and Skate 2 developer Black Box, according to recent reports.

Kotaku reports that while EA has said that it will close Black Box, the studio’s teams and “associated game franchises” are being moved to a nearby office, with the site noting that all of Black Box’s staff won’t be able to make the jump.

Meanwhile, Gamasutra reports that “multiple staffers” have been let go at Tiburon, though no additional details were offered.

The megapublisher is said to cut more jobs in its lineup of studios, with Mythic Entertainment and Pandemic Brisbane rumored to also be affected.