Dude, I'm really upset with what we've learned about the new Tony Hawk. I've been playing them since THPS1 and own all the major games (except Proving Ground because honestly it was unacceptable garbage). I have no idea who Robomoto is, but the truth is, I still want Neversoft to make the games. What has killed the series is that they've been putting out at least 1 game every year for the last ten years. Over the last few years, there have been regularly 2 games per year. When you're pumping out the games that quickly for such a long period of time, no doubt you're gonna run out of steam and ideas. They've milked the series for far too long and it's finally totally caught up with them. I have to agree about Project 8 being great. It was way better than I expected, and although it lacked a true create-a-park and featured a totally limited create-a-character mode, it made some smart additions to the series and built on the gameplay a bit. However, I gotta disagree with you on Tony Hawk's Underground. I think it's definitely one of the best games in the series. I really enjoyed the career mode, the missions, and most importantly, the level design. Whereas I kinda thought THPS4 was quite a stepdown from the previous three, but was still pretty solid overall. Tony Hawk's Underground 2 had the potential to really add some flavor with the whole Viva La Bam twist, but failed pretty miserably in that regard and just had all kinds of dumb decisions, you know... like Shrek.
Anyway, now that Skate has come out, I'm sure Activision is really kicking themselves and feel like they gotta totally innovate the series. As far as innovating goes, I don't necessarily disagree with that, but dude, if we're gonna be using Wii Fits or other similar board controllers, I think I may just have to pass. Read Giantbomb's review of Skate It on Wii, and you'll see that this board controller is probably only going to hurt the game. They need to tone the series down. Over the years, they've just collectively piled on more and more moves, to the point where I imagine the learning curve for beginners is outrageous. In Proving Ground, it reached a point where missions literally seemed impossible because they wanted you to do so much at once, not to mention Proving Ground foolishly put the entire game into super turbo mode, making the problem even worse. It kills me that Activision had the rights to the X-Games and used it with MTX Mototrax featuring Travis Pastrana, however, they totally denied the Tony Hawk series from getting the same treatment. They could have been doing Big Air years before Skate was even announced, which would have required them to tone down the ridiculous gameplay a bit to keep it from being stupid. Not that I'm saying I want the Tony Hawk series to go the route of Skate, but a little more realism would be appreciated. Heck, dude, in the last few games you can do double backflips and barrel rolls repeatedly in a single combo. They totally took it too far.
Personally, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is my favorite Tony Hawk game. It's probably my third favorite game of all time, I think it is basically absolute perfection. I actually got 100% completion in the game twice, which is no short task to do even once, let alone twice. So yeah, I played the heck out of that game. I'd probably rank the series something like this:
THPS3 > THPS2 > THUG > THP8 > THPS1 > THPS4 > THAW > THUG2 > THPG
I do wish the Tony Hawk series could at least go out with a bang, but I think the path it's heading down definitely is just going to make things worse. Maybe it's a bit too early to assume so much, but I'm not really interested in standing on a board to play the game. If the Wii has proven anything, it's that traditional controllers are still the way to go.
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