I finally received the empty cardboard box, otherwise known as the return shipping coffin. Open it up, stick in the PS3, slap the prepaid shipping label over the old one and you're off. The only worry I have is the fact that I had to get a printout of the original receipt, since Best Buy made me send in the real one with my free blu-ray rebate offer. Ahh well. If they try to hassle me about it, I'll tell them I have a blog! Where I'll write horrible things about them! And use emoticons like this !

News broke this week that Activision will give a break to one of its most succesful franchises by allowing the Tony Hawk series to sit out the 2008 holiday season. Though this move has come about four years late, it's still a fine idea--and certainly better than dragging out the withered husk of Tony Hawk for yet another round of incremental updates.

Perhaps it's the fact that I'm one of the few remaining Tony Hawk fans in existence, but I'm excited to see what they can do to this series by taking some time to reboot it. There was a time when every new Tony Hawk game offered a substantial improvement over the previous one. Tony Hawk 2 introduced the manual, Tony Hawk 3 kept combos going with the revert, 4 offered increased freedom by doing away with 2-minute timers, and the first Underground let lifelong skaters live out their fantasies with a compelling storyline. The latter introduction has always been a source of great conflict among fans of the series: some argue that the series peaked with number 4, but for someone like me who spent their youth skateboarding, I truly enjoyed the ability to live vicariously through my on-screen avatar as he kickflipped his way from anonymity in suburban New Jersey to taking it all in Vancouver's Slam City Jam.

But very few will argue that the series saw better days after that. Underground 2 handed the keys to Bam Margera with an incoherent, over-the-top storyline that felt less like skateboarding and more like an episode of Jackass. American Wasteland continued the theme of style over substance by going with a an overwrought, in-your-face, Xtreeeme aesthetic to compensate for the fact that the most touted upgrade--one giant, open-world Los Angeles--wound up being a disappointing collection of standard levels with tunnels replacing load screens. Project 8 actually managed to take a step backward by doing away with Create-a-park mode, which had been a series hallmark since the second game in the franchise. Nail-the-trick was certainly interesting, but didn't add much depth to the game.

And then there was Proving Ground. This game marked a series first for me: it was the first console game* in the series I have yet to play. For this, I have none other to thank than EA's Skate. When the demo for Skate first hit Xbox Live, it wrapped its hands around me and never let go. The controls were difficult to get a grasp of, but wound up proving to be immensely rewarding. And while the game was far from perfect--skating rails and ledges was great, but fumbling through pools never become anything more than awkward no matter how much time you invested--Skate's fluid appearance and mellow-but-stylish approach to skateboarding culture was just what the genre needed.

When Activision finally got around to releasing a demo for Proving Ground, it felt like I had just stepped into a time machine after all those hours spent cruising through San Vanelona. Apparently consumers felt the same way, because Activision wouldn't be conceding a year's worth of profits for the sake of creative growth. But what sort of growth can really be achieved by taking a year off? I'm not convinced simply mimicking Skate's "flick-it" controls will do Tony Hawk any good. Skate was such a promising game for a variety of other reasons: the animation and sound was superb, the close-up camera and realistic physics allowed minor tricks to feel like triumphant achievements, and never at any point was the game so "in-your-face" that you felt like you were forced to trudge through some artificial sense of style**.

Perhaps Neversoft should take a look at those reasons for success rather than grafting a new joystick-based control scheme onto a game that's been far too diluted over the years by over-the-top style and minor gameplay additions (Natas spin, sticker slap, kart-racing, parkour, nail-the-anything, to name a few). More than anything else, I would love to see the series get back to its roots--a simple, honest reverence for skateboarding culture--while giving the game a visual and audio overhaul to actually make it feel like a current-gen game. There's so much more to be said for adding new stumbling and feet-adjusting animations to make you feel like you're skateboarding rather than some bizarre new move that you'll only use once or twice throughout the course of a game. Go back and shine up those first few ways of linking combos instead of adding new ways to extend them. In short, simplify rather than complicate.

Tony Hawk has always been a lot like James Bond: over the years, he's developed an increasing number of skills/gadgets to go along with more and more elaborate and exotic settings in which to display them. If there's anything Casino Royale's reboot taught us, it's that you can take away most of those skills and still provide a compelling experience. Bring Tony Hawk back to the schools of Southern California and teach him to skateboard all over again. Hell, bring the player's avatar back to anytown, USA and propel him all over the world with an even more engrossing story. Just put a focus back on the skateboarding rather than all those extraneous elements that watered down a once-great game. After all, this is a series that used to have the word "Skater" in its title.

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*Let's not even talk about Downhill Jam.

**Except, of course, for those obscene close-ups on a pro skater's sponsors during skippable cut scenes.

Today I called up Sony to set up a repair on my newly-nonfunctional PlayStation 3. For those who didn't read my post about it, the ol' girl decided to stop reading any sort of discs. Thankfully, the whole deal is covered under warranty. The phone call was surprisingly painless, as I was expecting to deal with a service rep stationed in a call center somewhere in the windswept Siberian tundra. But no, good ol' Jose knew what he was doing and made the process fairly simple. So now I'm just waiting for the prepaid shipping box to arrive so I can send it on in.

In the interest of dilligent record-keeping, I've decided to keep a running tally on how long it takes until I receive a fully functioning PS3 in the mail. Day 1 begins!

I'm currently coming down from the high of a weekend-long GTA IV bender. At 28 hours in, I'm nearly done with the main story. My opinion of the game has come a long way from the time Niko first stepped off the boat in Broker. This game is, quite simply, a soaring achievement.

At first, I was suspicious of the tens that had been handed out so readily prior to the game's release. When you first get your hands on the game, it doesn't look like much more than Grand Theft Auto With A Face Lift. But after you spend some time getting lost in Liberty City, get to know the characters and experience the densely woven story with all its morally ambiguous twists and turns, any opinion you might have can only be considered premature.

Last night, I made the second gut-wrenching choice the game forces you to make. Games like Knights of the Old Republic and Fable have been offering moral choice in the form of a good-evil dynamic for plenty of years, but the concept of moral choice is so much different here. It's not that you're choosinig between shades of gray; you're simply choosing between bad and worse. If I could define the story's theme, that would be it. Niko has escaped a life of debt and crime to build something new in America. What he soon realizes is that he's inherited new debts in America, those of his cousin Roman. And the only way for Niko to keep from suffocating under the weight of this debt is to ally himself with increasingly powerful members of the diverse criminal underground.

Part of what makes the story so great is how deeply it integrates nearly all the characters you meet. In previous GTA games, you'd meet a string of increasingly off-the-wall charactes, while mostly forgetting about the ones you ran with early on. Those initial acquaintances would be all but forgotten by the time you'd reach the end of the game. In GTA IV, those characters stay with you -- especially the McReary family. Throughout the course of the game, you practically become a member of the McRearys. Without giving too much away, you're stuck to that family through the highs and lows. And for this tragic Irish-American family, the lows sink painfully deep

All of this held together by the game's real star, which is the city itself. Liberty City may be smaller than San Andreas, but it's about ten times more vibrant. While it may be hard to get lost on the way to a mission thanks to the new GPS direction system, the city almost compels you to take the scenic route whenever possible. Each borough is thoroughly unique, from the withered remains of the 1964 World's Fair in Dukes to the elevated tracks in Broker to the shimmering Algonquin skyscrapers. This version of New York City is stunningly realized with a fidelity that's difficult to put into words. You just have to get lost in the city.

But for as great -- truly, amazingly great -- as the presentation is, the repair work done to the gameplay stands out nearly as much. The polite thing to say would be that Grand Theft Auto has never been much of a technical marvel. The honest thing to say would be that each game since and including GTA III has succeeded almost despite itself. What I'm referring to here is the combat. Gun fights used to be a sloppy, haphazard mess that would act as roadblocks to the story, taunting you to make it through them. Now, they're a highlight of a reworked combat system. The cover system and the ability to pinpoint a section of your enemy's body while auto-targeting work beautifully in tandem. In a typical firefight, a car full of enemies will roll up on the scene, Niko will blast the driver (leaving a shattered windshield caked in blood), two enemies will make the mistake of popping up from behind cover only to get dropped by an expertly-placed bullet to the head, and the last remaining thug will cower behind the car as Niko slowly walks around to finish him off. These visceral gunfights are helped by Niko's great voice acting as he passionately shouts his way through those conflicts where the lives of his family and friends hang in the balance.

If I could blindly grasp for something to nitpick, I'd have to point to the handful of times my game has frozen on a load screen, or the at-times-annoying friendship system where buddies of yours will call you up to play darts while you're driving to your next mission objective (or, getting even more naggy, the cumbersome process of cycling articles of clothing). Other than that... it's difficulty to really find fault in the game. All those minor quabbles you notice when first picking up a controller, like the bouncy car physics and paper-thin trees, become afterthoughts either through getting used to them or allowing the incredible scope of the game to overshadow them.

Critics talk about GTA IV as the type of game that will rub off on players, investing themselves too deeply in it. That may be true. I can't think of another game where I can so easily lose an hour as I slowly drive through the rainy streets of Times Square, Jazz music bouncing through the radio.

Why Rockstar didn't make that an official multiplayer mode, I'll never know.

In my recent post on GTA IV, I mentioned how I was very tempted to pick it up for the PS3 due to doubts about my aging 360's reliability. The last thing in the world I want when I finally get my hands on GTA IV is a red-ringed console. So guess what! Two days before the game finally comes out, one of my consoles bit the dust. But if you guessed it was my two year old 360 rather than my three month old PS3, you would be surprisingly, amazingly, stupifyingly wrong.

That's right--my PS3 has decided it would no longer like to read any sort of disc, thank you very much. Still turns on fine! Still plays PSN games fine! But if you want to, say, put any sort of Blu-Ray, DVD or CD in there, you're effed. Totally effed.

What.

The.

#@!&.

I suppose the good news is I finally decided which version of GTA IV to get. And unlike a few short years ago when they tried to pass of 90 days as anything resembling a reasonable warranty length, they now cover the PS3 for a full year after the purchase date. Good thing. I bought my system about 3 and a half months ago, or 115 days. So that's nice.

But this? Everything else? Totally not nice.