It seems as if Activision let an extreme sports title slip them by, as Acclaim (under its AKA label) will have the first and only current aggressive inline skating game out on the market, and all during the holiday season, as there are no other games of this type on the radar screen. All the better for Acclaim.

Aggressive Inline will feature an initial roster of ten top pro skaters: Chris Edwards, Taig Khris, Frankie Morales, Shane Yost, Eito Yasatoko, Jaren Grob, Matt Lindenmuth, Matt Salerno, and Sam Fogerty. Developer Z-Axis is promising very intricate character models, with smooth animation and realistic clothing movement for the skaters. Even with all that detail, levels are expected to dwarf those in the Tony Hawk games while still maintaining 60 frames a second. That's promising a lot, although the demo at E3 was pretty solid.

There are many similarities between this game and those of the Tony Hawk series, although some details that improve upon it. What's virtually the same is the control scheme; if you've played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, you can easily pick up this game and start breaking out the high scores. The combo system, like linking tricks with manuals and Cess Slides (THPS's Revert), is exactly the same. The goal system is also similar, where you need to attain a set of high scores and complete a few trick requirements to move on.

What makes Aggressive Inline its own game is in the details. For example, rather than collecting Stat Points to boost your skater's attributes, an experience system of sorts is used. The more you spin or flip, the better you become. The more you grind, the better you get at it. Speaking of grinding, another neat feature allows you to change grinds in the middle of a rail on the fly. Want to go from a Royale to a Sole? Do it in the blink of an eye. There's also a "bail" button, which prevents you from going head first into the ground if you miss a quarter-pipe transfer. These features obviously blow the door open to insanely high combos and scores, making for an exciting game.

Acclaim's game sets itself further from Activision's series by adding in what they call a "juice meter." Instead of having only two minutes to rack up a high score, players must keep their juice meters high by pulling off tricks. If it's full, you can do specials, when it's empty, your run is over. That means a player can keep going and going for a pretty long time until you bail too many times and you run out of juice. Again, this could lead to mind-numbingly high scores, which is what the people like to see.

Other notable features include a park editor (which also allows you do add things to existing levels), split-screen multiplayer modes, NPC interaction, a physics system designed specifically for inline skating, and a large bag of tricks, Aggressive Inline is shaping up to be major competition to Activision and Tony Hawk 4, both of which come out later this year.