For my review of skate 2, I concluded that in order to fully appreciate the game, you would have to be a skater. 28 days later, I still feel about the same, though there are two details worth noting.

First of all, I came back to play it. It may be a bit of a shocker, but once I beat a game, that’s normally it. With the amount of stuff going on in my life, and the amount of games on my pile-of-shame from the holidays, I rarely slot a disk into my drive more than once. skate 2’s legs come from its charm of staying true to skateboarding. As mentioned in the review, there’s serenity in simply coasting around San Vanelona, looking for new spots to hit, and that doesn’t get old.

What can get old, though, is hitting specific tricks. This is a bitch. It’s the same problem as in the first game: the analog stick is great for heelflips and shuvits, but pulling off a 360-flip over a set of stairs can take forever. You can get through the career without doing challenges with this as a requirement, but for those wanting to explore the end-game, prepare to spend many frustrating hours on these chores.

As exasperating as it sounds, this is actually what blurs the line between real skating and skate 2. You spend ages trying to land a trick – most of the time feeling annoyed because you don’t know what you’re doing wrong – but when everything clicks, it’s magical; you know what you did right, what you should have done all those previous times, and an overwhelming satisfaction causes you to fist-pump in victory. This is why I will come back to skate 2 for months; this is why it will remain a favorite.