(continued from previous page) ...the user learn and improve' method. At least the story is no longer in one straight path, keeping you from progressing if stuck on a single event.

The rewards for each event (or lack thereof) make little sense. Just as with Project 8, each event in Proving Ground has three levels of difficulty. ‘Am’, for Amateur, is for the most simple to attain, providing tiny to no sense of achievement in completing an event. A ‘Sick’ ranking is on the other end of the spectrum, only attainable by the hardest of the hardcore Tony Hawk fans. The ‘Pro’ rankings seem about right – they’re difficult, but not frustratingly so. Unfortunately, you’ll have little incentive to gain more than an ‘Am’ ranking, as the game rewards the same amount of skill points for any of the three. For ‘Pro’ and ‘Sick’ you’ll get a little more in-game money to buy clothes and outfit your Skate Lounge, and who honestly cares about that? Anyone?

Speaking of the Skate Lounge, it’s making its debut in Proving Ground, and we could frankly care less. Sure, it could be fun having your own personal Create-a-Park area, but we’ve seen this without the fancy name and location as far back as THPS4. We don’t mind the addition, but we barely spent any time tinkering with the building tools, vying to be lazy and skate the world Neversoft made for us instead. We simply don’t see the appeal.

Finally, we come to the highly touted video editor. The complex system lets you save multiple clips and edit them together with tons of neat transitions and effects. It even times your cuts with the music you've chosen. Neversoft is off to an awesome start. Alright, so you just pulled off an absolutely insane building-to-building 900, and want to include it in a video you’re creating. Nope, that’s not happening. In Proving Ground’s video editor, you have to manually start recording each clip, as opposed to having a constantly recorded replay of your recent escapades. Also, Neversoft was apparently embarrassed to have the boxy-looking cars and ghostly pedestrians appear in any of your videos, so the game simply removes them from existence each time you start recording a clip. Cue jeering now.

Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is hiding a dark secret. We recently discovered what that secret was, and we’re going to share it with the world right here, right now. You’ve played this game before. Proving Ground is a nostalgic look backwards as opposed to an imaginative leap forwards. The fact that Neversoft hasn’t overhauled the gameplay formula for the next-generation has reared its ugly head in the face of EA’s innovative skate. When skate hit the market last September, it raised our expectations of what skating games could be. Consider those expectations unmet.