When digital memories fade, they don't go sepia like the old pictures in your grandparent's photo album. They instead blur and shimmer. There's no patina of dust, only a residual fondness often beyond what you felt originally.

When the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater came out, it was love at first play for generations plural of gamers. There was no equivocal response. The game was so deep, so good right from the get-go that to this day most will insist that the high point came not a year or so ago as is accepted wisdom with games (tech improving = game improving, that's the theory). Instead, you'll find many arguing that the high point came in 2000 with the first sequel, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.

Gaming is an oft unsentimental pastime. But we do tend to get misty eyed about our old favourites - which is something that the makers of the successive Hawk games have found. Sure, they have raked in plenty of loot, but try as they might, through experimenting with play mechanics through to turning the game into a massive story, they haven't succeeded in recapturing that two minutes of flat out thrills encapsulated by the first and second games.

Tony Hawk's Project 8 is the latest valiant challenger to try the impossible - to better what time has transformed into the perfect skating game. To try and turn around our idyllic perceptions. Sure, maybe 2 in 100 of us Hawk fans actually play THPS/2/3 more than once in a blue moon, but that doesn't stop us knowing it was the most fun the series offered us. Or does it?

Project 8 retains the story-basis that some tolerate, but many loathe. It retains the sprawling open world - the seamless big environment that some believe proved the death of the series. Two huge points that likely irritate purists a great deal, but make life tolerable to the newcomers buying in for the first time.

But unlike recent efforts, rather than dumb gimmicks or kissing the backside of whoever is the current poster boy (or girl) for the MTV generation, Project 8 pulls out a nifty trick. Or more correctly - you will. 'Nail the Trick' is the tag it goes by, and it's pretty much been the most significant inclusion since the manual came our way.

You get the first intimation that something might be up with the intro. Many keen beans tend to skip this kind of thing, but there's something stripped down and stokeworthy about this one that makes it worth your while to watch. The focus is on lush slo-mo - its rendered game stuff, not real footage, but for those of us who try to ride a skateboard it's good viewing. There's plenty of close up zoom on the board as it flips and rolls - if I'd had access to this a few years ago when I was trying to learn how to ollie... ah yes.

You'll get pumped by what you see in the intro, especially the sweet outstretched hand as Hawk s-l-o-w-l-y rises above the coping ... but you don't get to understanding the real import until you begin play. There's the focus function - induced by pressing the left analogue - this slows things down and allows you pretty much to destro any standard trick like it was cake. But by ollying and pressing both analogue sticks, you enter Nail a Trick mode. Here, once again you slow right down and get the fancy zoom effect, but now the sticks control your left and right feet respectively. And they reflect exactly the effect on the board of your feet tapping/sliding/nudging. You can get lost here, just trying to perfect moves. When you get the hang of the basics - it's every bit as significant for skating games as when the legendary Kick Off freed the soccer ball from being glued to the players feet back in the Amiga days.

Pretty much any mid-jump trick a 'real skater' can imagine from this point you can emulate - and even exceed. It is a bit fussy, but it's a beautiful addition to a series crying out for more realistic trick-related options. This alone elevates Project 8 to credible contention in the best-of-Hawk game stakes.

It's not 100% perfect - for starters those of us d-pad users are in for a hard time getting the hang of using the analogue sticks - its more confusion than it's worth just using them for focus mode/nail the trick, so you will find yourself slowly using the wobblies instead. This takes time - and if you've been a d-padder from day one, you're in for a fair degree of frustration.

Speaking on a more broader scale, the flow of the game is also a little more segmented - you unlock areas as you go - but once you have you can cruise wherever you like. And the incorporation of an even tidier series of trick challenges means often your secondary goals are literally scrawled kerbside. And there's a whole lot less flash-in-the-pan action - the featured skaters outweigh the silly characters. And finally you can have your own Rodney Mullen vs Daewon Song battle, as a crop of early 2000s rippers join the fold.

You score a compass that helpfully points you where you need to go, and while you start out pretty gradual, you can get intimations of "task overload", where you end up paralysed by the sheer number of things you can tackle. Not a terrible complaint (imagine how bad it would be if you just skated around aimlessly), but still, back in the days of "two minutes, go nuts", things seemed a little more ... directional. Well, we all bitched about wanting non-linear gameplay - here's what it looks like at present!

Project 8 still bites off more than it can chew - a Neversoft trademark. The whole point of being able to get off your board and run around is still largely pointless. It's a skating game - we're here to skate. Maybe by the time the Xbox 720 rolls around there will be a massively multiplayer world with people and content that makes wandering around in-game worthwhile, here, it just feels tacked on. Lots of vision without any real meat - this says.

Also, this game does have the odd framerate stutter, believe it or not. True, it's been developed for next generation platforms, so there's bound to be both a learning curve and some ambitious visual decisions made, but you don't want to have your timing thrown when you're trying to land a full-on combo. Just another excuse to push using Nail the Trick mode, I guess.

At least you're getting a good looking game to go with those occasional framerate dips. As you'd expect, this looks the business. At least, the environment does. Nice little water effects are in evidence, and apart from blood that looks almost pink at some stages, the effects are pretty gold as well. The interface remains uncluttered, thank god, and when you've seen focus mode/Nail the Trick in action, you will not have any complaints about the ability of the visuals to get the heart thumping. With all that said, the models - arguably as important as any other element - are poor. If you're expecting Gears of War-style facial features - forget it. It's not terrible, but it's definitely not anything to write home about. Tellingly, you get the first inclination that this may be the case in the intro video, where everything about the skater’s body/clothes looks primo, but then panning to their face it looks like a throwback to the days of "one facial expression only". For purists, it's not a huge issue, but for newcomers, well, it's these kind of things that register.

Multiplayer comes last in this review because it's pretty much an afterthought. Neversoft still haven't really got around to doing this justice. They're forgiven because they're polishing the rest of the gameplay, however you can't help feeling that once again, an opportunity is being missed. Rockstar have always been tentative about multiplayer in GTA because they would rather wait until they can do it right (excluding PSP, of course). Seeing the bare bones offerings here - global rankings for trick challenges, a cluster of piddly challenges that don't measure up to the full beast - it's really not much to write home about. Hawk remains a single player experience first, and multiplayer a distant, distant second.

Despite this succession of niggles, Tony Hawk's Project 8 deserves to sit second on the list of all time Hawk games. Third if you were one of the people seduced by THPS3's repeatability. Placing that high in this company is admirable. And if you never played THPS2 back then (now doesn't count), then you could argue very easily it's the best Hawk of all time. This is a good thing - after all, Tony Hawk games aren't going anywhere - the rights to the name run until well into next decade. Unlike the first go-round with hawk and Xbox 360 - there should be no major reservations about getting hold of this baby if you're a fan of the series.