The third track, Hardcore, is something of a mish-mash of the other two paths. In it for nothing more than the love of skating, the Hardcore skater will meet up with pros from time to time (as will all three skating types), but he's in it more for roughing up the occasional security guard or rival skater and stamping out dream skate spots for everyone else, all because they just want to get their skate on.

The three different tracks you can take aren't pre-set directions; you're free to mix and match things, but the only way you'll earn points that can be applied toward a specific path is to talk to the right people and take their path-specific challenges, identified in-game with the overhead map. Sure, these bits will give you more storyline bits, but if you just want to skate around and take on basic challenges to boost your stats (they still level up by doing specific things like grinding for a certain distance or pulling off high-point combos), the Spot Challenges from Project 8 return, allowing you to just roll up and start grinding something to see a pre-charted path for you to take to nail that Challenge. It's simple stuff, but it harkens back to the old-school games where many of the S-K-A-T-E and C-O-M-B-O challenges (where are still present here) were part of the world rather than kicked off with a conversation.

Fine, so the story is different this time around, but did we glimpse anything overtly new to the formula in our few hours of play time? Sadly, no, nothing that completely overhauls the way the game plays like the revert or manual, but we did check out the Skater Lounge, a customizable room (ours was all gothed out in a gloomy cathedral) filled with objects won during the myriad challenges in the game, and there was one little tweak that ate up most of our play time: the new Nail-the-Grab and Nail-the-Manual Modes.

Essentially built on top of the last game's Nail-the-Trick mode, both the new Grab and Manual bits are kicked off the same way as before, by clicking down both analog sticks, but from there, holding the L2 button for Grabs and R2 for a Manual allows you to throw even more tricks into the slo-mo, deck-focused viewpoint. Now, you can turn a kickflip into a simple grab and spin, or mix a few wrist flicks and a shove of the board into a nose manual coming down, and the best part is that with the manuals, the second you let off of the shoulder button, you pop back up, allowing you to keep the string going. It sounds like a minor addition, but it requires quite a bit of practice, and the slo-mo effect when playing in multiplayer is fun to watch.

Oh, wait, did we mention that nearly everything you can do in the single-player game can be done nigh-seamlessly by just hitting the Start Button and hitting the Online option? Yeah, see, you can choose to either host your own game in the city you're currently skating around in, another city, the whole world or a skater lounge, tweaking the options, setting a game type playlist (each with their own options) and leaving the game open for anyone to join. If you just want to drop into someone else's game, you can hit start, go to the same online menu and you'll see any games in your area (or you can sort by the whole world, a specific city or a lounge). It really is simple, and it's a nice way to transition smoothly from doing your own thang to strutting your stuff online against other people.