I actually think skate 3 is the best, gameplay wise. You could argue that the city was unrealistically perfect for skating but it's a video game, so who cares? Lots of dope spots to skate plus you can make your own parks/levels. Skate 1 had the best story mode tho out of all three, no question. Some of the spots like the schoolyard & downtown plazas remain some of my favorite spots in the series
The THPS games actually got me into skateboarding and I've been skating forreal forreal for almost 10 years now. THPS paved the way but they fell way the fukk off once skate came out. Idk how non-skaters feel about the controls/gameplay but real skaters would look at skate like it was NBA 2K compared to THPS which was like NBA Jam. I was extremely adept at both
but Skate is definitely much more like actual skating in the sense of having to learn tricks and really having to plan out your lines & positioning/angles depending on what you're tryna do. You can spend hours just chillin skating the same spot doing simple shyt or practicing your go-to tricks. I like to do a lot of more "realistic" skating in skate (I mostly played single player) but i can definitely cheese that shyt doing 360 hardflip railheads to bluntslide down a 40 stair just to piss people off. They got real floaty with the physics after a while so any type of megaramp skating in multiplayer was fukking ridiculous
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