FiringSquad: What other gameplay elements do you consider to be important?

Jennifer Oneal: One feature we're all excited about is called "Nail TheTrick." It's an innovative new way to pull off tricks. Players use the analog sticks to control the skater's feet on the board. It's almost like trading in your automatic transmission for a manual transmission. You'll have total control of the tricks you perform and might be able to invent some new ones we've never seen before.

FiringSquad: This will be the first Tony Hawk game made that will truly take advantage of next-gen console hardware. How will Project 8 use the hardware of the PS3 and Xbox 360?

Jennifer Oneal: Both consoles will allow us to take the graphics and the gameplay further than we've been able to go before. We've completely scrapped our physics engine and rebuilt it from the ground up. You'll feel a real sense of momentum and gravity. Also, we've incorporated new physics for bails as well. The physics incorporated in the ragdoll bail mode allow you to control where and how badly you bail.

Graphically we have major enhancements. You'll see that using our advanced shading and lighting system along with specular and normal maps make for the most realistic environment you've ever seen in a Tony Hawk game. Water looks like water with all the ripples and reflection you would expect when you skate through a shallow pond. Glass has the translucency of glass. The detail of every surface is amazing.

This year for the athletes, we performed complete face and body scans, and motion captured all of their tricks. When you see Mike Vallely bust out his signature Mike V Shuffle, it's actually him doing it. Skateboarders will be able to recognize their favorite pro's skating style.

Speaking of online play, Tony Hawk's Project 8 is built with full online capabilities for Xbox 360, including support of Live, classic two-player challenges, a new game called Walls (which plays like Snake or Tron), and up to eight-player online games. But Project 8 is not online for PlayStation 3. Not online for PS3. Only within the last three weeks has Neversoft received its PS3 beta kits, a black horizontal box about one foot wide by two feet long and two inches deep, with a slew of buttons and dials on its front deck. Neversoft is confident the PS3 version of the game will ship at launch in November, but it still hasn't received all of the software libraries and has no indication of how the online components will work on PS3, so it's not offering them. For a software company that's always supported the PlayStation system and was, in fact, the first developer to offer online play on PS2 with Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, that's saying something. Neversoft wouldn't explain any further, but it's clear to this reporter that if Neversoft could go online with the PS3 version, it would.