i found it to be very unappealing that mike plumb seems to have a relatively hard time maneuvering his board (the 'backside 360', all of the 180 flip variation attempts that were completely caught before the 180 showed). s'also curious because he's pretty infamous for his dusting off of the backside 180 one foot. it reminds me of a weirder, newer strain of the mid/late '90s phenomenon of all the menace techs who never properly learned board control and, for instance, could do flip/shove it-based tricks genuinely better than traditionally easier ollie variations. if we remember, hard, this was one of the main talking points at the height of the hesh v. fresh race wars of the period, all of which pretty much ran its course after the skatepark resurgence.
games of SKATE are dumb/cool because they force dudes to skate out of their comfort zones, the results of which are either admirably interesting failures/lucky successes or insights into where the skater went out to lunch on his foundational homework. to me the 8.5" board thing for lizard is kind of moot because i bet a randy colvin or a wade speyer could have made hail marys look neater. i'm saying, i like it as much as the next guy when old lizard goes really fast and lands a really cool-looking sketchy boardslide, but by my estimation a dude's skate appeal should roughly be expandable or shrinkable in scale. the gratuitous over-popping of tricks has got to stop 2