This past weekend I had a few buddies over to play with my new Xbox 360. We spent the majority of the day eating, drinking, and of course playing video games. I have both Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Gears of War, but we hardly played any of those games. Instead we spent most of our time playing the demo of Tony Hawk's Project 8.

In this demo you get 20 minutes to mess around in a little skate park. You can do some challenges, or get some goals, or just mess around. But we didn't do any of that. We didn't even play this demo the way it is supposed to be played. We didn't sit there and try to accomplish the goals, nor find the longest line, nor get the highest score. Nope. Instead we tried to rack up the biggest hospital bill we could manage. And it was damn fun.

Project 8 adds some new features to the aging Tony Hawk series that makes the game fun again. One of them being the Nail the Trick mode. But there were other new additions that entertained us more, including the ragdoll-like crashes and of course the hospital bill counter. In previous Tony Hawk games, when your skater crashed he would just go into a simple/scripted fall. But in Project 8 they fall and tumble like a real life ragdoll would (except for a few glitches here and there - an we took major advantages of those).

We would try to get our skater going really fast, or put them up on a high altitude spot and get them to crash as hard as they can. Yeah, it sounds kind of sadistic, but we weren't in it for the blood or bone crunching sounds. We just wanted to see how far we could get them to tumble. We started out kind of small and racked up some minor injuries, but then the glitches came in.

Every now and then when crashing, our skater would glitch and propel forward or straight up in the air at an incredible rate. It was hilarious watching him go from a minor injury to an instant 100 mph jet forward and slam into a wall. Or watch him crash to his knees then suddenly thrust 300 feet into the air. We did this for at least an hour trying to nail as many glitches as we could while laughing the entire time. In the end I ended up winning with an $85,000 hospital bill and 15 broken bones.

So if you have Tony Hawk's Project 8, or the demo, and want something new to do with it, then get get some friends together and go for the ultimate crash. If you're lucky, you'll hit a glitch and easily triple your hospital bill. Or let me know if you've been able to rack up a bigger hospital bill. Some of us find entertainment in the simplest things.