Tony Hawk: Shred

Tony Hawk: Shred built on the physical skateboard-board experiment from the previous title, RIDE, and expanded it with an entirely new mode - snowboarding. The same peripheral the player used for skateboard tricks now also simulates riding a snowboard down snowy slopes, so the game offers two distinct disciplines on a single piece of hardware and expands the repertoire of recognized movements with carving turns, jumps, and spins typical of snowboarding, none of which the game's skateboarding portion uses at all.

The Xbox 360 edition (like the PlayStation 3 version) was again created by Robomodo, the studio that had been behind the control board and RIDE from the start and carried the same peripheral hardware solution over to Shred. The Xbox 360 version additionally offers support for Microsoft's avatars - the player's Xbox Live avatar can be used as the rider in the game, a feature the competing PlayStation 3 edition lacks and which gives Shred on this platform a more personal touch and a different visual presentation of the player's character.

The snowboarding mode also required Robomodo to further develop the board's physics so it could recognize movements typical of riding down a slope - shifting weight into edges, crouching for jumps, and wider turns than in skateboarding - and the Xbox 360 version, with avatar support, thus combines this expanded peripheral physics with a level of personalization the competing PS3 edition doesn't offer to the same extent. Shred on Xbox 360 therefore remains the most complex form of the entire motion-control concept the series tried out with the physical board, before the next installment returned to a classic gamepad.

Why play it: The Xbox 360 version of Shred is notable especially for combining skate and snowboard modes on one board and for Xbox avatar support - suited to players who want to try where the motion-board experiment from RIDE ended up before the series ultimately abandoned this direction in favor of returning to the classic controls.