Here’s What I Think About - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
Intro:
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is not one that I played a lot as I was growing up. By the time I got into the series we already had it’s direct sequels, and it wasn’t long before the underground series would be releasing. Nonetheless, I was looking forward to trying out this game series' roots. I’m happy to say I wasn’t completely disappointed, but there were certainly areas that had me yearning to be playing one of the games’ sequels.
Content:
This game is packed with content. Pro Skater includes nine unique levels. Six of which you have more freedom to go around and do as you like in the career mode, three of those though are downhill jams. While you can technically still free roam in these levels, their steep hills make this impractical at best. All six have five different tasks for you to complete, should you wish to do everything in this game. Two score trials, S-K-A-T-E, a hidden tape, and a unique objective. These levels are all very enjoyable in my opinion. They leave you with plenty to explore, and secrets to find.
The other three, however, are all competitions. In these you have three chances to score as many points as possible with minimal mistakes. The better and more varied your move set, the more points you will be given by the judges. The more times you wreck, the more you’ll have deducted by the judges. Honestly, I didn’t care much for these levels. Their design tends to be smaller, with the focus almost entirely being on pulling off tricks. I personally find more enjoyment in exploring the levels and figuring out unique ways to accomplish the levels tasks than I do just grinding for perfection. Now, some of my bias is undoubtedly because I’m just not very good at these games. However, I feel this game really shines when you are given freedom to do more as you please, and these levels greatly restrict your ability to do so.
On top of all that you also have a few other game modes should you tire of career. You have Single Sessions. These are timed sessions, the same as what you would normally play in career mode, except you have no explicit goals. Then you have Free Skate. This allows you to take any of the skaters, along with whatever you’ve leveled their stats too, and skate around any of the levels you have unlocked for as long as you like.
Then, should you have some friends over, you also have three different two player modes to enjoy. Graffiti, which was my personal favorite growing up. In this mode you and another player battle to gain control of objects on the map by pulling off tricks on them. Completing a trick on an object paints it your color. Whoever has the most objects at the end wins. After that you have Trick Attack. This one has you and another player battling for the highest score before the time runs out. Lastly, there is Horse. In this game Horse has the players taking turns pulling off tricks and earning a score. The individual tricks don’t actually matter in this version of Horse. Just the total points for the combo. Should the next player score higher it goes back again to the first. Should they score lower they get a letter. Then you repeat until one player spells out Horse.
To round it all off you have ten different characters based off of real skaters. Each of which you can play through career mode if you wish. Ten wonderful songs by various bands. Dozens of unique moves to master, some of which are unique to each character. Stats and board pieces to unlock. And finally a couple of secret characters should you choose to indulge in a bit of cheating. These days cheating sounds like such a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be when you are playing a game solo for your own enjoyment. Turn on big head mode, make your skater unrealistically skinny, max out your stats just because, and of course, unlock those secret skaters. It’s your gaming experience, have fun with it however you please.
Graphics:
Being a PlayStation game, well it looks like a PlayStation game. If you’ve never played one before, everything appears a bit blurry. Like someone smeared a bit of Vaseline on your screen. The draw distance is short. Textures sometimes pop in front of others where they shouldn't. 3D models are a bit chunky. And the texture resolution and quality is limited. I personally don’t like to judge games off of others in regards to the graphical quality though. After all, for the time this game didn’t look so bad. I don’t believe it to have been breathtaking, but more than passable for sure. And of course all art is subjective.
Now that we got that out of the way, how do I feel about this game's art direction? Well, going with a more realistic art style, it hasn’t aged as well as other games of the era that went with something a bit more unique. Games such as Spyro still look great, PlayStations limitations aside. However, it’s not so bad that it harms the experience in any appreciable manner. It’s fairly obvious what's a ramp, a rail, a pool of water, etc. The only real problem I had was the draw distance. This is mostly a limit of the PlayStation, but it certainly made finding paths to some of the trickier hidden tapes, areas, and more quite a bit harder than they really should have been. I found myself often skating around the area trying to find just the right area to get the camera to stop in just the right way that I could see a hidden ramp clearly enough to figure out what it’s connected to and how to get there. At the end of the day it only takes a couple of extra minutes per level to figure these things out, and it’s only a small inconvenience.
So, long story short, if you’re like me you’ll quickly get over the muddy textures and poor draw distance to enjoy this game for it’s content and gameplay. I, and hopefully you, will nearly forget you’re playing a twenty some odd year old game.
Sound:
Anyone who grew up as a gamer in the 90s knows how influential the soundtrack to Pro Skater was. With it’s CD quality licensed audio, it was many young gamers first introduction into the punk rock scene. While none of the bands included were huge in the mainstream media to my knowledge, it wasn’t uncommon to hear one or more of the tracks used in this series of games on peoples mixtapes or burnt cds. With 10 different tracks to rock out too while enjoying the arcadey skating experience, I doubt many would get tired of this games soundtrack within any reasonable length play session.
The sound effects thankfully were also quite decent for the time. Ignoring some questionable grunts anytime the player wrecks into a wall or misses a ramp on the way down, the game has some wonderful crunchy, and squishy sounds just grotesque enough to convey the pain of wrecking face first into a wall. Other sound effects also hold up reasonably well. The sounds of your board grinding against metal or stone, the rolling wheels on concrete, it’s all passable enough to not be distracting.
Control:
This one was hard for me. I regularly struggled with the controls in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Yet, when I compare it to other extreme sports games of the time, it's obvious just how strong the controls here are. Sure, sometimes you’ll probably swear you were holding forward to launch off of a half-pipe yet you somehow stayed in it. Other times you may fly out when you know you weren’t touching forward on the d-pad. However, these issues aren’t super common.
Neversoft also managed to squeeze in plenty of unique moves by borrowing some techniques from the fighting game community. Pressing a series of buttons on your d-pad before pressing either square or circle will result in unique moves while you are in the air. Pressing and holding triangle while near an edge or rail will snap the player to it allowing you to grind along, assuming you can keep your balance with the right and left arrows. A simple tap on the cross button will have you jumping in the air, or extending your jump a bit if you are already airborne.
This relatively simple control scheme is intuitive for most. One you will quickly find yourself getting comfortable with. However, should you spend more time with the game you will find it has layers of depth that really separate the casual players from the pros. For me it’s this control scheme that really separates this game from the other skating games of the time, as well as those that have come out since. Nothing, in my opinion, has been able to match the deep, yet welcoming controls of the Tony Hawk series.
Personal Enjoyability:
I love the Tony Hawk Series, or at least the earlier games within it. At a point though, it seems you can go a bit too early. This game in particular has some small control issues that can be annoying at times, though it’s possible to overlook. More annoying is how this game is missing key features, the largest of which is the ability to manual. This single handedly changed the series, allowing you to risk longer combos for the chance for even higher scores.
I had originally started playing this game just because I missed the series and wished to explore it’s roots. As I got to the later levels and began to struggle more with the score objectives, I found my personal enjoyment waning. Still though, I kept being pulled back into the game. While it may not be as good as others in the series, it still scratches an itch that only Tony Hawk can for me.
TLDR:
Now, as much as I love the games, I’m not much of a skater myself. I hardly know the names attached to the playable characters. While the moves you pull off in the game certainly appear impressive, I have no idea how impressive they really are. None of this matters to me though. Unlike a Madden football game, or FIFA, this game isn’t meant to be played exclusively by the people who watch every game, or follow every player.
Consider then the wealth of content, and this quickly becomes a game I could have seen myself playing for years, had it not been for the sequels.
I highly suggest giving this game a try. If it’s not accessible to you, maybe one of the HD versions, or the newer 1+2 HD collection that has released on PlayStation 4, PC, and the Xbox One.
