I still have an old PS2 hooked up to my TV. I have a few old games for it that I never wanted to get rid of. There's an old games store near where I live in Dublin (it's called The R.A.G.E if anyone's interested) and I happened to have some credit for their store. So I popped in yesterday and picked up a copy of Tony Hawk's Underground - the last of the main series that I really truly liked before I started to think "Ok guys, maybe give it a year off". I also picked up Rage Racer and Die Hard Trilogy. Side story - as a dumb kid I never realized that Rage Racer was just a Ridge Racer game. So I used to just get annoyed at Namco for not making another Rage Racer and shunned the Ridge Racer series forever. Also that Ridge Racer 4 controller looked super dumb.
I was like many people, hopelessly fooling myself that this time Robomodo wouldn't screw it up again. Tony Hawk: RIDE and Tony Hawk: SHRED are different. They had to try make those games work with a weird controller that was probably better suited to an arcade machine than it ever was to home use. The HD collection was pretty bad though. But when we all saw that this one was called "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5" a few of us foolishly thought it would be a return to form. 5!! That mean's something. That number is important to anyone whose followed the series because apart from Tony Hawk's Project 8 it's the first proper numbered sequel in the series since Pro Skater 4. Project 8 wasn't called Tony Hawks Pro Skater Project 8, it was Tony Hawk's Project 8. That's different.
Yesterday as I finished creating my skater (after picking from many more options than 5 has available) who would go on to impress Chad Muska with sick tricks around the abandoned pool outside the high school and immediately got back into the grove of endlessly spinning, flip tricking and grinding my way to high scores while listening to Clutch, Mastodon and Busdriver I turned to my girlfriend and asked, "How did Robomodo screw this up? Have they never played these games before? How does this still feel so good all these years later and yet someone they've managed to take something beautiful and ruin it?".
THUG is not a perfect game. As soon as it told me to get off the board and start collecting bits of my friends skateboard that bad drug dealer dudes threw up onto the rooftops of New Jersey before throwing me into a car to control I remembered that this is almost when the wheels started to fall off. But THUG had the trick system. It had really well designed levels to skate around. It had a great soundtrack. Getting off the board was fine, it was just kind of dumb what they sometimes asked you to do when you where off of it. And I get it. The folks at Neversoft Entertainment had to do something to try keep the game fresh even if honestly I would've just been happy to get an updated trick list and some rad new levels every year. And even when it does ask you to do stupid stuff like race a car it's mostly inoffensive. The car handles in the most boxy way ever but it's fine. It's not fun, but it's not difficult to control it and you don't spend ages retrying the objectives over and over. And soon it's over and you're back to pulling back to back 900's while spine transferring off the top of a hotel before you turn it into a manual that you start combo-ing into fliptricks and handstands before grinding your way on every rail, fence and 90 degree angle and if you mess it up who cares, just press start, down, x and you're instantly giving it another shot.
The thing that really gets me about 5 is just how the destroyed all that. How is it that with the power of the PS4 and the Xbox One can I not just skate up to a dude, get an objective and instantly be loaded to whatever location it is in the stage that I have to do it in, or that the objective instantly loads in and out once done? One of the first objectives when you get out of New Jersey and into Manhattan is a dude asks you to pull out grind combos on two boxes. You skate to him, get the objective and instantly those boxes are there, highlighted to say "yo use us!" and a timer is running. The second you finish all the combos, the boxes instantly de-spawn and you continue skating as if nothing has changed. How is that still not a thing?
It's a shame that this is very obviously it. This is all we're getting. The final nail in the coffin. Activision are unlikely to care enough about getting the rights to Mr. Hawk again unless he's SUPER cheap this time around. Our best hope is that someone starts a Kickstarter project that gets funded with an expected release date of 2018 but ultimately we won't see until about 2022.
So rest in peace Tony Hawk games. You where once a staple on my Christmas list to my parents. I spent many hours with you and after I finish THUG I think I'll go back and dig out the rest from my parents house. I know I have 2 and 3 in their place somewhere unless they made their way into a box that took a trip to the charity store. And Aggressive Inline, the best non-Tony Hawk Tony Hawk-like game.
And if nothing else, thanks to Robomodo for getting me to replay Tony Hawk games, even if they're not the ones Robomodo made.
Other than kickstarter projects this is probably it for skating games. Or Skate 4 happens. God let that happen. I'll buy it with a $40 season pass or whatever you want EA.
PS - Rodney Mullen had the best skate videos in all Tony Hawk games ever.
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