Great Review AK,
http://www.psxextreme.com/ps3-reviews/68.html
though no mention of the video recording of your tricks.. I don’t know if it was immediately obvious to you as you were playing as it took me a while to discover ‘the joy’ of recording your tricks. As you can record some fluke, amazing trick or some weird thing that happened.. sort the camera angles out, slow down ..speed up, and add tones to it like greyscale or sepia etc etc.. then after you have done that, you can upload it to the Skate community for everyone to view and rate. Theres some incredible videos there ..and I have three on there too, but mine are just my efforts as a newbie skater, but there’s some that are amazing. And some that are just down right hilarious to watch, and as painful as watching real skate vids. Every time I play skate I always play freeride online and then check out the latest videos.
I urge you to check this out, as I think it’s a really important part of the game, maybe even essential.
The frame rate problems, I totally agree, they are at times bad.. but after my lil trick (check out the ps3 forum) of changing the settings, I swear its better. Not perfect, but im certainly noticing the frame drop less. Either that’s because my settings are working or im just not seeing the frame drop, I don’t know.
Great game though, and not perfect, certainly paves the way for skate games to come. I feel that learning a new way to control this sort of game from Tony H was totally worth the effort, as you say.. you feel like you have earned the trick you just pulled off, mainly because you have!