What Happened to You, Tony Hawk? You Used to Be Cool....
Posted on Tuesday, August 16 @ 16:27:27 Eastern by danielrbischoff
Go ahead, listen. Soak in the greatness. It doesn't take long for your thumbs to remember the Christ Air, the 900, the Darkslide. This song will be timeless, not for the band, nor the lyrics, nor even for how little your mother and father liked it. Sure, those are viable reasons to remember "New Girl" by the Suicide Machines, but none of them compare to one man.
QUICK! Where is the hidden tape on the school level?
What best start you can make on in the Warehouse?
WHERE IS THE ALIEN IN AREA 51?!
You probably know the answer to all of those questions, purely thanks to the endless, nearly immortal replay value of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and its direct sequels. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 will remain hooked up to my TV for years, purely to serve as a platform for some turn-of-the-century skateboarding action.
My college roommate Ryan Campbell could land nearly every trick, knew each soundtrack song, and schooled me on more than a few occasions in THPS's multiplayer modes. This wasn't shocking. There was always someone better than me at Tony Hawk.
What was surprising was that Ryan had only ever played the demo disk. It just goes to show how many hours you could sink into THPS's levels, even if you had collected every tape and broken every high score record. What am I talking about? What's happening here? 50 ccs of Tony Hawk OST STAT!
So what went wrong? Somehow, the publisher flogged the franchise into the ground with yearly installments.... They also started marketing the game totally wrong. Seriously, f*** those people. Why does every Tony Hawk game have to be about knocking over mailboxes and trash cans?
They also surgically removed the addictive arcade nature of every level. Instead of a playground full of ramps, grinding surfaces, and huge air, THPS started focusing on interacting with NPCs and running errands. Sure, a persistent free skate mode is great, but I don't want to talk to pretend people. I just want to be a skater.
The solution? A remake, plain and simple. It's not as if the concept of a remake is unheard of in this day and age. In fact, it would make a ton of sense as a downloadable game. THPS would rake in the dough on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. Slap on leaderboard support, the ability to capture and upload replays, and bring back the soundtrack.
I almost feel like I've done the job for you, Activision. Don't say I've never done anything for you.
WAIT- Wait! Stop.
DO NOT add a leveling system, special trick unlocks, or a peripheral. Just... don't. OK, you can go now. I didn't want you to leave without saying that.
I don't think what was great about the first few Tony Hawk games can be re-captured, it was their simplicity and just plain fun. More games were like this in general in the PSone era though, simple fun, not crammed to the brim with features just for the sake of it. The games had levels instead of one huge open world because that wasn't the trend yet. I miss those days, when racing games had tracks instead of a world or hub, when platform/action/adventure games had levels instead of a world. But people seem to like that now, don't think you can go back to the way things were because although it was simple fun at the time, now it will feel like a step back.
Oh, and the soundtracks were way better in those first 2 games also, awesome 90's punk and such, not a lot of the crap from today. And I'm not just saying that because I like music from that time better than now and I have an old fogey attitude, I love a lot of music now, they just don't pick the good stuff for the new games, they pick the trendy stuff.
I think they were great for not taking themselves too ridiculously. It became this rediculous mess that was more focused on the fanfare. Along the lines of what you said. I still plug in my 64 to play Tony Hawk.
THPS 1,2 & 3 still have one thing over the Skate franchise and that is split-screen. It's probably the biggest reason me and my brother could just keep on playing this game without getting bored when we were younger. Graffiti mode and trying to purposefully run over each other when one of us knew we had speed advantage, haha good times.
I'm still waiting for a Skate game with split-screen because I do like the control scheme they use, but without split-screen I haven't touched my copy of the game in a while. Haven't even been interested in buying the newest one since they still haven't included it as a feature.
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Such great music in those games.
I'm still waiting for a Skate game with split-screen because I do like the control scheme they use, but without split-screen I haven't touched my copy of the game in a while. Haven't even been interested in buying the newest one since they still haven't included it as a feature.