E3 06: Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--Tony Hawk's debut went over well on the Nintendo DS with American Sk8land, which came out late last year. Instead of sticking to the same formula, Activision and Vicarious Visions are working on an entirely new and different game of skateboarding. As the title implies, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam is a downhill racing game, but it retains the same focus on performing all sorts of zany tricks off of anything and everything in the environment. We made our way over to the Activision booth to get our hands on this decidedly different take on the Tony Hawk series.

The demo we played took place in San Francisco, which is convenient because the city is full of long, steep hills to race down. There are supposedly six different stages in the game, including Mt. Kilimanjaro, Hong Kong, and the aforementioned San Francisco. Each stage has approximately 30 different events for you to partake in, including straight-up races, elimination races, timed races, long-distance grinds, and trick competitions, as well as big-air missions where you have to accumulate as much air time as possible within a time limit. There's also a big-air photo mode where you have to hit a specific ramp and clear a gap while a camera records it.

The standard races are fairly straightforward. You have a boost button that you can use for an extra burst of speed, as well as a grind button and a trick button. Simply pointing your board downhill and hoping for the best wont win you any races, though. To win, you need to boost, and to boost you need to perform tricks, much like in the SSX snowboarding games. There's a boost meter at the top of the screen that fills up as you bust tricks. You can either use it up right away or let it accumulate. If you save up your boost, a small icon will light up at the top of the screen, and you can perform a supertrick, also like SSX. The supertrick that we performed with Tony Hawk was a sort of break dancing move where Tony spun his legs around while holding on to the board with his hands.

Downhill Jam supports up to four players for online races, and it even has built-in voice chat so you can send short messages to your friends as you play. There will also be ad hoc Wi-Fi multiplayer, but there's no word whether or not the game will support any sort of cart-sharing.

The game has a cel-shaded look similar to Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble. Although the game is somewhat cartoony-looking, the character models are accurately proportioned, and they animate well. The stage we saw looked good, with tall buildings and a good sense of height to make those huge jumps especially satisfying. The game also moves fast, with a steady frame rate and some decent motion-blur effects to enhance the sense of speed.

Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam is scheduled to be released later this year, so check back soon for more information about the game.