Aggressive Inline surprised quite a few people with its intense gameplay and deep control when it debuted on the PlayStation 2 not long ago. We recently had a chance to play a relatively early version of Z-Axis and Acclaim's GameCube version of the game, which is set to release this August. Aggressive Inline's translation to the Nintendo system brings with it the same levels, characters, graphics, and gameplay of the previous versions, and it is shaping up to be a faithful rendition of the well-received original.

The characters and levels in Aggressive Inline are quite colorful.

Aggressive Inline's playable characters are a blend of real-world inline skating celebrities and a number of original characters. Heading up the roster are 2001 X Games street champion Jaren Grob, 2001 Gravity Games and X Games vert champion Taïg Khris, Shane Yost, Franky Morales, Matt Lindenmuth, Sam Fogarty, Sven Boekhurst, Matt Salerno, Eito Yasutoko, and Chris Edwards. In addition to these pro skaters, the game starts players off with access to a pair of original female characters, Chrissy and Jordan. Chrissy is one part stereotypical schoolgirl and one part adolescent male fantasy, complete with pigtails, a tied-up shirt, and a revealing skirt. Jordan is the more believable character, with a tight-fitting shirt and big, baggy pants. Both of the female characters, for what it's worth, feature the jiggly motion effect that was popularized by the girls of Tecmo's Dead or Alive and Mai Shiranui of the King of Fighters games. Other, more bizarre characters can be unlocked with extended play, including a Bride of Frankenstein-type and a peg-legged pirate with a single wheel on the end of his prosthesis.

Each skater is ranked in seven different categories, each of which is attributed to a relevant ability. As skaters progress through the game's single-player career mode, they can improve their stats in jump, speed, spin, grind, manual, fakie, and wall ride. While these stats may seem familiar to anyone who has played one of the recent Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games, Aggressive Inline truly starts with the typical gameplay and control of the extreme sports genre and takes them to a new level. Features that are expected to appear in the next generation of Tony Hawk games are already being used in Aggressive Inline, including the ability to talk to characters you encounter in a level in order to get new objectives. Also available to skaters is the ability to skitch, or ride behind cars by holding on to their bumpers, as was available in Jet Set Radio Future. The depth of control in Aggressive Inline allows for some fairly spectacular moves, including vaulting over waist-level obstacles and swinging around vertical and horizontal poles, much like the protagonist from Airblade. Aggressive Inline also integrates the abilities found in most modern extreme sports games that allow players to extend their runs, including manuals and cess slides. The cess slide transitions into four different types of manuals, depending on whether your character is facing forward or backward, and it is the key to transitioning between vert tricks and manuals for extended trick combos.

Playing with these characters in the game's career mode will allow you to improve their basic abilities. The way these stats are increased is similar to a modern RPG system, as it is truly an experience-based process. As you maneuver your skater around a park, the CPU keeps track of which maneuvers and tricks you pull off and rewards you accordingly. Pulling off many different vert tricks will raise your jump and spin stats, while extending long rail runs will raise your grind statistic. Thus, your skater's attributes will grow in a direction that suits your personal play style, or you can tailor your skater in such a way to compensate for your weaker abilities.

Instead of the typical timed runs of other extreme sports games, Aggressive Inline instead uses a "juice meter" that functions much like the special meter found in the Tony Hawk games. Each run begins with an already depleting juice meter that fills as you successfully perform tricks. When the juice meter is maxed out, your skates leave trails of sparks and fire in their wake and tricks are generally more impressive--you'll catch more air, or be able to pull off longer grinds with ease. The speed really picks up when you're in this zone, and your skater will seem to almost fly across rails. Since you can continue to pull off tricks to keep your juice meter full, a capable player could theoretically continue extending his or her run indefinitely.

You can string together huge tricks.

The number of tricks and moves at your disposal during any given run is almost overwhelming--you can grind on virtually any rail or edge, and you can hop from rail to rail, linking grinds together over gaps, extending their lines. Grinds can be maintained for a very long time, especially since you're able to switch between different grinds, which auto-corrects your balance. When it seems like a particular line is finished, you may be able to hop off at the right angle to swing around a lamppost, further extending the trick. You can skate forward or backward, switching back and forth with the Z trigger, and switching between them lets you access different sorts of manuals and tricks. And, of course, there's a wide variety of spin and grab moves that can be pulled off to rack up the points, which in turn will unlock more levels. Each grab move can also be tweaked at its peak, in effect doubling the number of moves available in the game. Also helping you keep your tricks going is the ability to save yourself from a bail by pressing the X button--a very useful feature for the gravitationally challenged. Some of the inline skaters' moves are considerably over the top, but their real-life counterparts can actually pull some of these things off, including spinning flips and other hair-raising maneuvers.