As well as a huge city that can be skated around at your leisure (though hanging on to buses and trains to get around - Marty McFly style - is an option), there's the usual smattering of extras you'd expect with this kind of thing, namely an extensive create-a-player mode, clothes shops, skate stores and the local hairdressers where you can make yourself beautiful.
There's missions galore as well (assisting in the construction of a huge skate park is just one), and a wealth of sub-quests and sponsored challenges that largely involve indulging in 'street' activities, such as finetuning new styles of graffiti. Oh, and there's a BMX to master.
In between the shopping, hair-cutting and conversing with your pink-haired friend Mindy (yes), you'll get to do some skateboarding. Neversoft will be introducing a host of new moves, including one-foot grinds and manuals, double flips and rolls, a backflip, Bert slides and Bert rolls (apparently inspired by crazy seventies surf legend Larry Bertleman), an enhanced Natas Spin, the Freak Out, handstands, pogo board moves and a bunch of other daftly monikered manouevres.
The Xbox version will be featuring an online mode, which we seem to recall is a first for the series (though the franchise has been online on the PS2), though Neversoft hasn't expanded on how this will work. The Xbox 360 version (which will be appearing after the Xbox, PS2, GameCube, DS and GBA versions do this October) will also support Live, and there's an offline split screen co-op modes to muck about in.
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