I love skateboarding games. I've always been fascinated by skateboarding, but never had the talent to do anything beyond simple fliptricks and grinds. I'm obsessed with trying to recreate realistic skating in every game I play. I used to turn my characters stats all the way down in Tony Hawk games and try to recreate lines from Flip Sorry or Yeah Right.
My favorite PS1 era game is Thrasher Skate & Destroy. It couldn't compete with Tony Hawk's popularity at the time and was mostly overlooked, but it was a much better game. It focused more on realism and had a pretty steep learning curve for performing advanced tricks. I remember some tricks even took up to 5 button presses to perform. Many of the levels came from real life spots such as the San Fran china banks, LA river or Embarcadero. The animations for the time were really well done too. I still think this game has the best looking wallrides in any skateboarding game. I also have to mention that the soundtrack was excellent. Every song in this game is a classic from the golden age of hip hop.
The PS2 generation saw the continued popularity of the Tony Hawk series. I played all of these games, even the awful THUG2. I think the series peaked at THPS4. But to be honest I was never a huge fan of Tony Hawk's approach of encouraging the longest combo by manualing and reverting your way to the next telephone wire grind. I did enjoy them in free skate mode, playing my own way.
In 2007, EA created the skateboarding game I always wanted but never thought I'd get. Playing the demo to Skate for the first time was one of those generation-defining moments that completely sold me on finally buying a 360. I couldn't believe how well they captured the feeling of skateboarding. Just pushing down the street and popping an Ollie up a curb felt satisfying. Doing simple grinds and flip tricks was actually challenging at first. The learning curve of the flick-it controls was brilliant and really did mirror the feeling of learning to skate in real life. The environments were realistically designed with hundreds of unique spots. They gave you so much control over how your tricks looked that you could perform the same trick on a spot 10 times and have it look different every time.
The sequels improved(and in some ways worsened) some of the core aspects of the first game. I personally think Skate 3's Hardcore mode is the best addition to the series and makes going back to the first two games pretty difficult. But I really group all 3 skate games together - they're all excellent skateboarding games and the best the genre has to offer. Most of all, My love for the Skate games is because they completely embrace the creativity of skateboarding. They understood the appeal of letting you skate spots how you want to, even letting you skate spots in ways that were never intended. It's one of the most creative game series I've ever played and I find them endlessly replayable.
I know EA Blackbox was pretty much gutted

, but I hope we don't go too long before we get another realistic skateboarding game.