When I was an adolescent, skateboarding was the world. Names like Bob Burnquist and Rodney Mullen covered the disgusting teal colour of my room. I had a Spitfire board with Element wheels, Darkside grip, and Independent trucks. I was so close to that board I should have given it a name. It would float me through the streets, transforming average suburban neighbourhoods into playgrounds for my mind, which would always be thinking of the best line. This was, of course, before I attempted to hit any of those lines, which always ended miserably, after not being able to ollie more than a few inches off the ground. Still, those days were more about dreams than talent, and that board let me escape to a world where I could do everything my idols could, and more.

Now my room is orange with no posters, and the names Burnquist and Mullen have changed to Drydek and Duffy – who, just to give you a sense of my current skateboarding expertise, I had never heard of previous to playing this game. My old Spitfire is in the garage, under piles of hockey pads and old comics. Yet, even without the board, skate 2 reminds me of how great it was to feel the wind through my hair, pushing and coasting through the streets, thinking I could do anything.

It is far from the perfect video game. It has many annoyances. Firstly, all of the things wrong with skate are back again in skate 2: the inability to hit hard tricks on command, the annoyingly sporadic difficulty throughout the story, and the worst fucking character creation tool in a modern video game – it’s all here. On the plus side, all of the things done right in the skate are also in skate 2: the trick system that is both realistic and intuitive, the brilliant camera, the personally-rewarding challenges – all here too. There are also some improvements to the graphics, a few extra tricks to add to your already beefy arsenal, and the ability to get off your board (which is mostly forgettable, save walking up stairs).

I went through that pretty quickly. That’s because none of it matters. The small pitfalls and the tiny steps forward do little to hide that skate 2 is simply real skateboarding done justice in a video game – but that’s all it is. If you ever loved real skateboarding, you’ll love skate 2; if you didn’t, you’ll find the annoyances a little too much to bear.