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PREVIEW
This preview was posted after E3 1999. Check out our review here.
When I read on the E3 website that Tony Hawk would be making an appearance in support of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, due this fall from Activision, visions of Psycho Skate danced through my head. But on that fateful Thursday afternoon half the people in the Activision area were clamoring “Where’s Tony” and the other half chimed in “Who’s Tony” and in an environment like E3 it takes a man stronger than I to resist the pull of so many great games. It was obvious that Tony would be busy signing glossies and shaking hands, and, hell, I can see him every other night on ESPN2. I found myself playing RockStar’s new Skate and Destroy title, trying to cash in on an old school tie to Thrasher, thinking, “I hope they did better with Pro Skater.”
They did. The following day Sarah and I stood in line for our turn at THPS. We had hardly begun to comment on the delights of the first level, a school yard ripe for the grinding, when Aaron Cammarata stepped up to ask us how we were doing. Aaron is a designer for Neversoft, and gave us the full scoop on what will undoubtedly be the best extreme sports title of 1999.
THPS features pro skaters: Tony Hawk, Chad Muska, Kareem Cambell, and five others. Levels include a school in Miami, a mall, a canyon in Arizona, an indoor park in Chicago, and Portland’s infamous Burnside skatepark, among others. There is a single player “quest” mode, where you try to complete several objectives to create your own skate video, and a few different two player modes.
The graphics on THPS are great. The skaters look like their real life counterparts, and the terrain is well lit and textured. The movement is excellent, and the control is completely revolutionary in board-sports games. Usually you have to “charge” a spin, or you just tap the direction you want to spin, but either way the amount of spinning you do is arbitrary and generally removed from what you really meant to do. In THPS you hold the Right and Left buttons to rotate, and you have to be sure to land with the board pointing a reasonable direction. It’s a bit tricky at first, but becomes quite natural. Tricks are performed with three buttons: kickflip, grab, and grind. Various button and Dpad combos coupled with variations in the terrain make for a huge number of possible tricks. Everything from straight indy nosebones to madonnas and japan airs are possible, and to score really high you have to master trick combinations.
All of these factors are bolstered by a smart sense of skate community, an aspect of the game being largely attributed to Tony Hawk’s involvement. Aaron said that Tony guided the designers away from creating a game that is at all dated. There are no Gotcha jams or food tricks here. Tony is not only a founding father of the sport; he is still a world champion skater, and his savvy really comes through in this game. Of the several tasks on each level, one is a good old game of SKATE. There are also supposed to be many secrets, shortcuts, and hard-to-reach spots to reward endless hours of play.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is a game that slams the competition. While everybody and their mother throw out “extreme sports” games this year, Activision and Neversoft have created a street skating game with credentials.