Today's game is Skate 3. It's a great skateboarding game that still looks and plays great even 10-years after it released. It also brings back fond memories of when skateboarding was the hottest thing in the world and the X-Games was actually about extreme sports. Read more and watch Skate 3 gameplay here.
I'm not going to talk much about Skate 3 here. It's great. It's fine. It's good. Everyone knows that. The end.
What I do want to talk about is how much the X-Games suck now. Back when it first started in 1995(!) it felt like an actual special event. It only happened once a year and, along with skateboarding and BMX, it had actual extreme sports like speed climbing, sky diving, and the awesome X-Venture race where teams had to race 300-500 miles on foot over just a few days. Later they added rally racing and supercross events. The X-Games was appointment viewing and it was awesome.
Then they started taking the "extreme" out of it. The events list got greatly condensed into whatever got ESPN the highest ratings or was cheapest to produce. Even worse, it was no longer a special event. Now there are multiple X-Games events held all over the world. And don't even get me started on the TV coverage (because I don't know). All I do know about watching the X-Games on TV now is that ABC shows different events from the same X-Games basically every Saturday all Summer long. That blows.
The X-Games in its current state is like the Diet Coke of "xTreme". It is watered down and homogenized and carefully packaged to cater to the mainstream instead of celebrating actual extreme sports.
The X-Games is super freaking lame now.
