I've come to think of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series kind of like my Aunt Bertha. She's an enjoyable person and has her own little hilarious backstory to success, but, oddly enough, when she gets some new gloss put on her, like a hairstyle that seems wilder than anything Marilyn Manson can cook up, you can't help but see a little fascination added on to the old thing. The Tony Hawk series is back for its seventh go-around, this time with American Wasteland, and fans should be pleased. The rest of you...eh, worth a rent.

The game puts you in the shoes of a young skater wanna-be who wants to build himself into the glory status of Hawk and become the next great boarder. So what's a guy to do when his dreams exceed the small town that he's living in? Transport himselt to Los Angeles, that's what. Here, in the game's Story Mode, you follow in the shoes of his upstart and a few of his newfound friends as they make their way all over the city, completing a number of goals and pranks, collecting items, and eventually making the place an American skateland.

Of course, the story's just a bit modified from Tony Hawk's Underground 2, where two teams of pranksters went on a "world tour" trying to prove their worth in prankhood, but this one seems to revert back to the old style of the Tony Hawk games, instead of some underground movement. The results are a bit surprising, and give this game series a bit more mileage than I would have expected.

The Story Mode in itself is just one offering, but it's plentiful with a number of goals to complete and items to collect for your home turf, some of which lean on the downright bizarre and don't exactly look normal sitting next to a worn-out sofa. Still, it has its moments, and you can switch between a number of given characters throughout to prove their mettle in different tasks. It's just a bummer that you can't add your own created character to the mix like you did with Underground, as it would have given the game a bit of personality. At least you can mess with the characters at hand, though. Dress them up like clowns, I say! Call the fashion police!

Another bonus about Story Mode is that you're not really given everything right away, and have to earn new abilities and tricks, such as the Focus Mode (sigh, which is still flawed) and a couple of other new moves. It's not entirely frustrating, and will have skating fans digging into new moves for a few hours.

There's also the return of Classic Mode, one of the best additions to return to the Tony Hawk series in some time. This allows you to revisit old levels from the previous games in a fully glossified form, finding old and new goals strewn across a number of terrains like Minneapolis and Atlanta. There's also new icons to find and a lot to open up in here, which is great. I loved this mode in THUG 2 and I love it even more here.