Writer’s Note: The “Courageous Gamer” plays notoriously bad games so that you, the “common sense” gamer, can avoid them like a plague ridden rat. Basically I play bad games so you don’t have to.
Activision’s Tony Hawk games took a huge chunk of my game time at the start of this century, and that time-suck didn’t diminish until the add on of peripherals. My Tony Hawk collection for non hand-held consoles is nearly one hundred percent, I even took a bullet and bought Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5. I really don’t know what I was thinking, maybe I was too hopeful that their newest installment would bring back my early twenties, or maybe I wanted to punish myself; either way I lost about sixty bucks. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Needless to say my Tony Hawk collection shall grow no more after this tepid installment.
My first experience with Tony Hawk was one of chance; I walked into a Funco Land and they had the newest installment playing on the GameCube. I patiently waited my turn to try out Tony Hawk’s third game and immediately fell in love when I started landing grinds and doing big air tricks. Needless to say I left Funco Land with Tony Hawk in tow and immediately began to create my likeness in the game when I entered my abode. My good looking avatar was grinding rails like the best of them and I know that that was due to the excellent control scheme the game had. Collecting all the S-K-A-T-E letters, finding the video cassette, and racking up huge high scores was so easy and smooth. THPS3 and THPS4 were the pinnacle of the series, everything after has been nothing but a downhill plummet.
THPS5 has to be rock bottom for the series; I had such high hopes for this release, but they all came crashing down like me on a real skateboard. I should have known that when a Day-One patch was announced that was bigger than the actual game that I needed to walk away. Tony Hawk has his talons in me though and I dropped the three Andrew Jackson’s just to feel my heart break. I patiently waited for the patch to download and install, and then I grabbed my controller and tried to skate down memory lane. Memories are great because you keep them forever and they usually don’t change; THPS5 took a nice defecation on my memories. The only thing this installment nailed was the controls; Activision did not have the controls changed and playing this turd was like riding a bike again.
My CD collection almost doubled after playing THPS3 and 4 because the soundtrack in both those games was phenomenal. I remember rummaging around in the settings menu, so I could hear Flogging Molly’s Drunken Lullabies over and over, and I smashed every high score I could. When I moved this series to the original Xbox, I could listen to all the Flogging Molly my heart desired. The Xbox had a nice side feature that no one really remembers called “custom soundtrack.” Not many games let you use this feature, but the Tony Hawk series did and it made my experience even better with the games. Microsoft let this feature slowly dissolve into nothingness; it would have been very useful on the Xbox One so that I could listen to the music I wanted to instead of the schlock they chose.
Environments were almost lifelike in THPS3: there we moving objects, specific environmental things to destroy, lots of jumps to land and gaps to find. As you skated around you would find destructible walls and windows which would lead you to secret areas and other collectibles. The new environments are so bland, I swear that cells on Alcatraz had more personality than some of these levels. The first level I encountered had some half-pipes that I could grind around on, then a few little jumps, and a pool I could do tricks in and grind around and around. Boring. The first level I remember playing in THPS3 was the foundry level which was a thousand times more interactive than any level in THPS5. There were rails that were close to one another, so I could hop from one to the other in quick succession to up my multiplier. In the new one I couldn’t find anything to hop to except for really flat surfaces, and that makes skateboarding a drag.
The final item that was completely lost in this newest installment is how you could skate from challenge to challenge with no breaks in-between. Now if I want to collect S-K-A-T-E or attempt another challenge in the level, I have to go to a certain marker and accept the challenge. I understand that Activision wanted to include online play with the challenges, but that only slowed down the game. Instead of seamlessly going from challenge to challenge, they decided that you need to skate to a marker in the world and then accept the challenge. After that, you wait anywhere from 5 seconds to 10 seconds to be thrown into the challenge area. I couldn’t stand this new aspect of the game as it completely broke the whole experience for me. Unless there is a drastic change to the next installment that fixes most of these issues, I will not be coming back.
The gaming industry is a funny one; generally things get better with age but in gaming that is not so. The series started off great and then was horribly treated. It is sad really; many other franchises are taking the same beating when they just need to be laid to rest and remembered fondly. I guess it is up to us to stop purchasing these titles. I’m a guilty party as well. Giving Activision my sixty bucks told them that it is okay to butcher our favorite titles and release them over and over again. Shame on me, shame on me. At least they did learn a little lesson and cancelled the last gen version of this atrocity, laid to rest before awful things happened. I guess I’ll just ride my Onewheel GT to get my skating fix.