SPOnG finally gets a hands on demo with EA’s SKATE this coming Monday which, by all accounts (and judging by the first incredibly realistic gameplay trailer below) is shaping up to be the Tony Hawk killer many of us secretly hope and want it to be.

The game is set for a late summer release on PS3 and Xbox 360, with the trailer below taken from the 360 version - though your eyes might not believe it. Yes. It. Is. That. Good.

Unless you live in the Himalayas, where skateparks are less rife, you may be aware that there is already another skateboarding videogame series on the market. Here at SPOnG, Marcus still bangs on about the glories of the last version in Hawk’s mega-selling videogame skateboarding series, but to many who aren’t quite as obsessed about skateboarding in the real world, that game – Project 8 - only offered a few minor additions to the last iteration in Tony's series.

Activision/Neversoft has set the bar so high though, that EA really need to deliver something extraordinarily good if it's going to compete. Can SKATE topple Hawk's hegemony?

So the time is ripe for a new skating videogame to offer gamers and skaters something a little different, something a little extra they might not even have known they wanted before.

The devs at EA Black Box claim to have recreated the feeling of being on a skateboard better than ever before. We’ll confirm for you if they have succeeded on Monday, so watch out for our full preview then.

In the meantime, please watch this trailer if you want to understand why this game is already making us moist with anticipation. In all the wrong places.

Also, you can also see a rather bizarre interview type-thing with legendary skater/artist Mark ‘The Gonz’ Gonzales, who is clearly insane and requires some painful shock therapy to stop him doing bad things!

Skaters, Marcus assures us, will know of the loon that is Mark Gonzales, from way back in the mid 80s when he was among the first to pull ridiculously big ollies and skate handrails. It could be argued that, along with Rodney Mullen and Natas Kaupas, he was one of the early influences in what later become street skating.

First Look Video
MPEG4 XviD (18.0MB)
Quicktime (16.3MB)
Windows Media (12.5MB)

The Gonz
MPEG4 XviD (11.9MB)
Quicktime (12.8MB)
Windows Media (8.4MB)