The history of videogames has always been, in part, a journey from abstraction to realism. Early on, this journey focused on realistic presentation -- making games that looked and sounded more like real life. Now that game systems are grasping closer and closer to photorealistic visuals and immersive surround-sound audio, the push for realism has begun to skew towards creating more realistic simulations and control schemes.

A long straight grind... thrilling...

The push towards realism in simulation was perhaps exemplified by EA's Skate, a 2007 release that eschewed the fantastical, high-flying antics of the long-running Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series for a more grounded interpretation of skateboarding. This year, EA's extended the push to realism in controls with Skate It, a Wii spinoff that uses the Wii Balance Board to approximate a real-world skateboard. The issue isn't how well they've succeeded in replicating the real skateboarding experience -- I'd be ill-equipped to answer that question anyway -- but, as always, whether this push towards realism has made the game more fun. The answer with Skate It is a qualified no.

Granted, you don't have to control Skate It with the Balance Board. The developers at EA deserve credit for including a mode that maps a wide variety of skateboarding moves to the largely button-free Wii remote. The move from button-presses to remote-wiggling isn't pain-free, though. Some tricks, like front-footed nollie flips, are made overly complex by requiring uncomfortably angled wrist-twisting to pull off, while others, like two-wheeled manual balances, are made too easy by requiring a simple constant tilt of the Wii remote. The larger problem, though, is that the Wii remote hardware isn't sensitive enough to accurately detect the many nuances of motion required to differentiate each trick. The game frequently misinterpreted my requests for complex pop shove-its as simple ollies or kickflips, a mistake that ended up being quite costly in many competitions. In the end, using the Wii remote adds a lot of frustration without adding much in the way of realism or engagement.

Ooh, a massive kickflip 180! Don't hurt yourself!

Which brings us to the Balance Board controls, the feature that's supposed to make Skate It more realistic and engaging than previous skateboarding games. At first blush, they seem to do just that -- the first time you actually press down your back heel to do a simple jumping ollie, or lean back slightly to hold a difficult manual, you're liable to think you're actually experiencing the future of videogames. The impressively direct connection between in-game actions and real-world movements replaces the frantic button-pressing of past skateboarding games with something that requires real physical coordination and an entirely new skill set.

Or so it seems at first. After that initial thrill of excitement, though, the day-to-day use of the Balance Board to control your skateboarder becomes a bit more troublesome. The first problem comes in trying to turn the board, which involves leaning back on your heels or forward on the balls of your feet. On a real skateboard, this sort of leaning causes the board to slide to the side underneath you, providing an automatic counterbalance to help you correct your stance. On the immobile Balance Board, though, there's nothing to compensate for your altered center of balance, making turns difficult to hold and even harder to reverse when you want to straighten out again. The end result is frustratingly imprecise turns that will make you wonder whether you weren't better off steering with the Wii remote.

This looks more exciting in a still shot than it ends up being in practice.

Performing tricks with the Balance Board isn't a piece of cake, either. Pulling off anything other than a simple jump requires a good deal of pressure to be placed on the edges and corners of the Balance Board. Ideally, this would just require a quick shift of balance to one side or the other, but in practice it often required me to pick up a foot and absolutely pound on a corner of the board, sometimes lifting the opposite corner off the floor in the process! Not exactly a carefree experience, and one that was particularly frustrating during competitions.

Aside from the controls, the realistic simulation from the original Skate has been retained for this follow-up. You won't be guiding your character through mile-long grinds or 1,200-degree mid-air spins in this game. Instead, you travel through a generally interesting variety of skating areas -- including an impressive earthquake-ravaged city -- stringing together minor tricks into depressingly dull videos and photos. While this focus on realism is probably exciting for experienced skaters, for others it's just as likely to cause boredom. In the Tony Hawk games, the reaction to a gigantic string of tricks is, "I can't believe I just did all that!" In Skate It, the reaction is more likely to be, "I can't believe that's all I did." I couldn't help but feel that the experience in Skate It wasn't that different from the one I could have by simply buying a skateboard and hitting the streets.

In Skate It, this unfortunately qualifies as "big air."

Of course, that real-life learning experience would leave me with a lot of bruises and broken bones, which gets to another problem with Skate It -- the frequent, bone-crunching falls from the board. When you watch edited videos of impressive real-world skaters, you don't usually have to watch the dozens of punishing, failed takes that led up to that perfect run. With Skate It, though, you have to play through each one of these bone-crunching bails. Every time you land too hard from a high drop, or hit a grind pole at a slightly wrong angle, or catch the edge of a curb with the corner of your board, you go flying off the board in slow-mo black and white. The game fetishizes these spills into a "Hall of Meat" that highlights your broken bones. But while these spills are occasionally fun to watch, they usually get in the way of the action. The long, slow seconds you spend watching the black-and-white bails are seconds that you're desperately jamming on the buttons, trying to get back to the action. Again, the realism gets in the way of the fun.

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It could be argued that all these control struggles and virtual pain make the success all the more satisfying when you finally pull off that perfect line. But these moments are too few and far between -- and even when they happen, the results are often so cautious and pedestrian that you'll wonder why you bothered investing the time. This is especially true when you compare the results to the crazy spins, twists, flips, grabs and grinds that punctuate some of Tony Hawk's most impressive combos.

Most gamers are used to games that allow them to escape from real life -- to perform impossible feats like flying through the air, knocking bad guys 100 feet with a single punch, or fighting off a zombie horde. The real problem with Skate It is that it takes the realism trend too far, bringing the player down to earth with all the frustrations of real-world skateboarding when it could be lifting them up with fantastic visions of things that could never be in real life. If the choice is between realism and fun, I'll take fun any day.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.