Giant Bomb Video Game News

Electronic Arts held an event last week devoted to showing off its big release for January, Skate 2. With the game due out next month, it's probably pretty close to finished and so far, it looks pretty good.

The "grab the world" button lets you skitch a ride.

The new thing being shown at the event was the Create a Spot mode, which lets you duplicate a lot of the functionality of the franchise's Own the Spot mode. These are places around the world that simply have basic objects for you to trick off of, and you need to beat a set score to complete the challenge. Creating your own, however, lets you move around objects and set a precise scoring zone for the spot to let you configure the challenge in any way you see fit. After moving around ramps and creating a big, glowing box to designate where your spot is, you have to skate it yourself to set a score. From there, you can share the spot online and challenge friends to beat your score. Once your spot is online, it can be rated by other players much like the Skate Reel feature in the previous game. If you're looking to beat some created spots, you can sort by rating, and so on. Spots that don't see much use eventually expire, which should help ensure that there's some actual competition on the available spots.

Beyond that, I was able to just skate around New San Vanelona, the rebuilt version of the city from the first game. While you'll recognize some areas from the first game, like the Matrix Plaza, the old areas have been substantially redesigned. As someone who played an awful lot of the original game, it feels like a new, but still somehow familiar city. You'll also find some entirely new sections of town, like a waterfront, the projects, and San Van Mountain, which sounds like it'll let you gain ridiculous speed as you skate downhill.

Naturally, the game has some control changes that look to nearly double the amount of tricks in the game. Thankfully, these trick changes come in the form of modifiers and additional buttons, rather than just trying to cram more motions onto the already-crowded right stick. So you can use the kick buttons to work your feet into more tricks, the R1/RB button can be used for handplants, grabbing your board before trying to ollie performs bonelesses and beanplants, and so on. The additional trick controls feel really natural.

I have to say, I really appreciate EA's devotion to only releasing shots of this game that feature the fisheye lens.

The Thrasher Hall of Meat was a segment of the first game that showed you how badly you had messed yourself up when falling. It was pretty clever, but it stopped the action to show you, and it eventually gets in the way, especially in the slower-loading Wii game, Skate It. Now, your bails are converted into points and shown on a quick Hall of Meat pop-out score indicator. The developers on-hand said that those points would be useful for something in the game's career mode.

Add to that an already smooth-feeling 60 frames per second on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and you've got a pretty healthy-looking sequel. I voiced my concerns about some of the challenges in the first game requiring specificity that the right stick on a controller just wasn't made for and heard back that the career mode would be a bit more branched this time around to let players focus on something else when they get stuck on a challenge. While that doesn't seem like it will completely solve the problem, most of what I've seen so far has me pretty excited to see how the final product turns out. Expect it in stores on January 21.

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Xbox Live To Drop Original Xbox Support This April Better get those last few games of MechAssault out of the way now...
EA Reveals Lineup For Fiscal 2011 "Fiscal 2011" means "From This April Until Next April."
LucasArts Announces LEGO Star Wars III Clone Wars cartoon series gets done up in block form for release later this year.

Xbox Live To Drop Original Xbox Support This April Better get those last few games of MechAssault out of the way now...
The Top Characters of January 2010 Hey, curious to know who the most popular characters of January were? I was, so I went digging.
EA Reveals Lineup For Fiscal 2011 "Fiscal 2011" means "From This April Until Next April."
LucasArts Announces LEGO Star Wars III Clone Wars cartoon series gets done up in block form for release later this year.

	BioShock 2
	No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
	MAG
	Mass Effect 2
	Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter
	Dark Void
	Trajectile
	Army of Two: The 40th Day
	Darksiders
	Bayonetta (PS3)

Dante's Inferno (Divine Edition) PS3 \| X360 - Feb. 9, 2010
BioShock 2 PS3 \| X360 \| PC - Feb. 9, 2010
Star Ocean: The Last Hope - International PS3 - Feb. 9, 2010
Darwinia Plus XBLM - Feb. 10, 2010
Two Worlds: The Temptation X360 - Feb. 10, 2010
Windchaser PC - Feb. 10, 2010
Super Monkey Ball: Step & Roll WII - Feb. 9, 2010
Shiren the Wanderer WII - Feb. 9, 2010
Scene It? Twilight DS - Feb. 9, 2010
World of Outlaws: Sprint Cars X360 - Feb. 12, 2010

Video_Game_King Diving into things that overwhelm me, I play an RTS. Sort of.
Bruce Not going to review the new Hot Chip because I fucking hate it.
lukeyk To much comparing to the first one?
markB0SS past weekend-rockbandathon, birthdays and stay puft marshmallow
alpha99 Impressions: Blaster Master Overdrive (WiiWare)
SamStrife Enduring Final Fantasy IX - Episode 0: Preulude
Darro Bioshock 2 Special Edition Unboxing
Sezzilla Shepard.....
thatguy0130 Adverse Weather Conditions
aurahack Triumphant Victory!