Grind Session Preview

With the successes of recent skateboarding games like Tony Hawk, Street Sk8er, and Thrasher Skate and Destroy, it's no surprise to see another skateboarding title emerge.

Sony has been working on Grind Session with Shaba games for the past year and a half. The game features ten skaters to play as - four are generic skaters but the other six are real professional riders such as Daewon Song, Willie Santos, and Jon Cardiel. The game has several modes of play both for single and multiple players. The one-player modes included in the game are tournament, free style, practice, and training. Not all of the multiplayer modes have been worked out yet, although we were shown several, such as a party mode of sorts where eight people try to outdo one another by pulling off tricks and landing monster jumps. You get 20 seconds to do your best - whoever has the most points at the end is the winner.

To clear a level you have to build up your respect meter to its capacity. To do this you must perform a certain number of tricks and accomplish specific objectives - objectives such as tech bonuses. Tech bonuses are basically specific runs, or stunts, that the game points out with onscreen arrows. Each level has ten tech bonuses to accomplish. Five are of average difficulty, but completing the other five requires some serious skill. You'll also have to accomplish various interactive-environment mini-challenges within each level. Some levels will have you chase pigeons in the park, others will force you to move something. Doing well and clearing levels earns you cool pictures and videos of your skater performing tricks and stacking up.

The controls have basically the same configuration as Tony Hawk's. The feel of the game at this point in development is already surprisingly solid. While the game seems to be more a bit more grounded in reality than Tony Hawk is, Grind Session by no means feels like a simulation.

Graphically, the game looks like a cross between Tony Hawk and Thrasher Skate and Destroy. The levels look sharp, the skaters move realistically, and the game has some nice visual effects.

While the sound effects and audio in the game are still being worked on, the one thing that can be said about the game in the audio department is that it has an impressive soundtrack. It features real music from bands like Man or Astroman, Sonic Youth, Suicidal Tendencies, Zen Guerrilla, Cornelius, GZA, DJ Shadow, KRS-One, and more. Jeff's Hands-on Impressions

Grind Session, more than any other non-Tony Hawk skateboarding game, is a very easy game to pick up and play. Why? Because the control scheme is nearly identical to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. The triangle performs grinds, circle handles grabs, and square performs your jumping tricks, such as heelflips. Holding down X will make you jump higher. The comparisons don't stop at the control. Your in-level goals are also similar. Each area has two score-based goals, one breakage-based goal (such as hitting ten trash cans, or pigeons, or boomboxes), and one goal based on skating technical lines, essentially asking you to play connect the dots on a skateboard. Hitting R2 at any time will cause the technical lines to show themselves, and you'll see colored lines connected by large colored circles. To skate a line, you simply must perform a trick combo while passing through all of the circles. Each level has ten lines, and as you have probably guessed by now, some are extremely easy, while others require superhuman feats.

What sets the game apart from Activision's Hawk is the sheer number of tricks available. As the game progresses, you earn lots of new tricks, and the professional skaters in the game start out with a ton of tricks already available. Each direction with square or circle performs a different trick, and there are also lots of harder tricks that require multiple direction presses, similar to some of the special tricks in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.

While it may be easy to look at Grind Session and write it off as a Tony Hawk clone, Grind Session has an unreal amount of depth. The levels are nice and large, and the various technical lines force you to skate an entire level, not just one pipe or set of rails, if you want to progress through the entire game. Plus, there are lots of modes aside from the main tournament mode. Single-player modes include a short training level, open skate, and endurance, which puts you in a level and tells you which trick or trick combos to accomplish within a set amount of time. Multiplayer modes include a variant of Horse, where one player does a trick, then the other player must match that trick and then add one of his own. The string of tricks gets longer and longer until someone messes up and earns a letter. There's also a best trick challenge and standard points competition.

The graphics are nice, particularly the animations used for all the tricks, and the soundtrack is populated by some really great tracks from Dr. Octagon, KRS-One, Jurassic 5, GZA, the X-Ecutioners, NOFX, Black Flag, and more.

We've been having a lot of fun with Grind Session around the office. Look for a full review of the game on the site a little closer to the game's ship date, which is currently scheduled for mid- to late-May.