Skate 3

Skate 3 is the pinnacle of a series that dared to challenge two decades of skateboarding game conventions and replace button-mashing with thumbstick movement. Tricks are performed with the right stick, whose motion corresponds to the actual movement of a foot on the board: a quick flick down and to the right sends an ollie to the left, a gentle circular motion does a kickflip. The result is controls that take longer to learn than the classic scheme but reward feel and fluidity. When it clicks, the player is no longer assembling combos from a menu but actually riding.

The third installment moved the action to the fictional city of Port Carverton and put emphasis on building your own team; tasks revolve around selling boards, and the game offers a choice between a style focused on slow technical tricks and aggressive riding on rails and stairs. A key addition was a park editor and the ability to share your own creations with other players, complemented by a co-op mode for tackling challenges together. Training lessons also finally explain clearly how the whole system works, so the series was suddenly recommendable to newcomers too.

On Xbox 360 the game ran smoothly and reliably, even though visually it wasn't a technical marvel; more important was the animation, which comes closer to real skateboarding than anything before it. Part of the charm is also the notoriously loose crash physics, thanks to which the game became an inexhaustible source of internet videos where characters fly across the map like rag dolls. The soundtrack mixes hip hop, punk, and indie and matches the atmosphere of the genre precisely. Reviews were favorable, and over the years the game built up an enormous community following, much bigger than at launch. Today Skate 3 is probably the most cited skateboarding game of all, whether for the riding or for the chaos. The right-stick control scheme also proved to be such a strong idea that later games return to it as a matter of course, even though few of them have appeared since.