I remember the first time I played a Tony Hawk game. It was the late 90’s, and I had just picked up one of the PlayStation demo discs. After playing through some of the other games, I landed on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I figured it was worth a go, and that’s when I was hooked. Since then, the franchise has been alive and well, jumping from THPS 4 to Tony Hawk’s Underground, to American Wasteland, and last year’s Project 8. Soon, they’ll be joined by the ninth installment, Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground.

And the series has always done well; I’d venture that this is because of the familiarity, name recognition and the deep pockets that stand behind it. But this year, for the first time since forever ago, there’s a competitor to The Tony: EA’s Skate. The basic premise was the same: like Tony Hawk’s games, you have a character who rides a skateboard around an environment. But that’s where the similarities end.

Skate‘s main claim to fame is that it tries to rely as little as possible on buttons, because skateboarding is not really well-represented by pushing buttons on a controller. To combat this they’ve moved most of the primary controls to the two analog sticks, and in doing so they’ve created what I’m convinced is a much more organic and rewarding experience. I’m serious. I’ve probably spent almost as much time playing the demo as I have on the entire game of Project 8.

Project 8 had me kind of excited last year. The demo placed you in an entirely believable skate park with nearly no indication of making you do ridiculous things. That I assumed this would carry through to the rest of the game makes me feel foolish in hindsight. I always go into a Hawk game hoping that it will be less ridiculous this time around. I am always disappointed.

In essence, what I was really wanting finally came in the form of a brand new franchise. They couldn’t have timed it better; the Skate demo came out late last month (I think), and the new Tony Hawk demo, Proving Ground, was just released yesterday. That schedule gave me and a lot of other gamers some time to get acclimated to the new control scheme, and also made us see the Tony Hawk series for what it has really become: a big joke.