666th played so far
Genre: Sports
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 2006
Developer: Neversoft
Publisher: Activision
We’ve played a Tony Hawk game before, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. That was fine, a skating game in preset arenas that felt mismatched – not that natural and, even though you’d always want to create a setting with some good elements to skate off of, it wanted to make you feel like you were in an environment, which you simply weren’t.
Now there are six years between the release of that game and this one, and it’s been six years since I played the previous game. It’s a nice analogy, and I feel like I’m going in fresh because of it.
Our Thoughts
While playing this game, I was starting to wonder whether we ran into the same problem as we did with Parappa the Rapper. I found it really difficult to get the timing of the combos right, even in the tutorial, and I am wondering whether the game wasn’t adjusting enough for modern TV latency. It could be that I couldn’t quite get the timing right, but struggling with this in both the tutorial and early levels of the game, I hope it’s that rather than the game being set to too high a difficulty.
It meant that I struggled to get beyond the first area, instead I mostly explored the initial area. That was a lot of fun, finding the different places where you can do tricks and where you can interact with different challenges. But again, when I struggle to spin for long enough in the starting area, what lies beyond doesn’t matter, and you do run out of stuff to do in the initial area (which leads to me trying to break the game’s physics… multiple times).
Final Thoughts
The game’s potential is there, but – through either difficulty or technical changes – the game doesn’t give me a chance to actually see where it ends up going. It’s frustrating, because I tried and it couldn’t get out of my way.