Saturday Morning Gaming: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 (remastered)
I am not one of the “sports games” people. I mean, I appreciate the amount of craft that goes into making the next Madden or FIFA or The Show and I occasionally think “hey, I should play that”, it’s never enough to get me to actually shell out the cash to play it. There’s always something I’d rather play more and always something I’d rather spend the money on (which can include stuff like “groceries”).
I suppose Pro Wrestling games (which I do enjoy) exist in a grey area. Is Pro Wrestling a sport? Well… Okay, are Pro Wrestling games “sports games”? Well…
Anyway, back in 2001, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 came out and everybody gushed about it. First the video game magazines, and then the video game websites. Then people I knew! Like, people just wouldn’t shut up about the game. Even people that weren’t “sports games” kinda people talked about this game and how awesome it was. Okay, fine. I’ll check it out.
I quickly became one of the people that wouldn’t shut up about the game. Even if you weren’t someone inclined to ever get on a skateboard, this was a fun game. Even if you were someone who made jokes about how you always see kids in some parking lot trying to do a trick and they always, always, always, always fail and ask “has anyone ever successfully done a skateboarding trick?”, you’d say “holy cow, this is a fun game”.
Just taking your skater and mastering all kinds of tricks was fun. There were little mini missions like “collect the letters in SKATE” and you had to get them all in one combo to pass the mission. The main part of the game, however, was all about combos and extending combos and not crashing (a crash zeroed out everything you’d done in the moments before… so there was real cost-benefit analysis at work when you thought about going for it or just cashing in whatever points you’d already accumulated). “Oh, I almost got it!” is something that I said more times than I can count.
On top of that, the game had a soundtrack with fun punk, neopunk, rap, and rock tracks. Upbeat stuff, half of which appealed to old folks (Ramones, Rollins Band), the other half being new stuff that was hot (AFI, Pre-Smooth Criminal Alien Ant Farm) and it made a perfect companion to the vaguely antisocial stuff you were doing in the game.
It was just pretty much perfect, start to finish. It was a game that was so good and so polished that even people that didn’t really like sports games liked this one.
Tony Hawk 4 came out and refined the formula and then Underground came out and let you customize your own character. You want to play a bald, bearded, chubby guy who skated in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt? Well, you could spend an hour in the character creation screen and get a guy just like that. And the game now had a full-fledged story mode with a plot and everything! And since you were playing a custom character, they could have your character actually break the law in the game! (For some reason, they tried to avoid this sort of thing with licensed characters.) You were a guy trying to break into pro skating and you had the most evil rival in the world in Eric Sparrow. (Gosh, I HATED that guy.) It took the downright perfect game of Tony Hawk 3 and added a REASON to be making a jump over a flying helicopter.
Underground 2 was… let’s call it controversial. I hated the story in the story mode and so didn’t play it. Others tell me that if I liked the television show Jackass, I’d have a better understanding of what the game was going for.
After that the games more or less fell off my radar.
UNTIL YESTERDAY.
They’ve announced that they’re remastering Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 and 2 (the two games that came out before I jumped onboard Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3) for the new generation and, HOLY COW. THIS LOOKS AMAZING.
I’ve already pre-ordered it. Even though I’m still not much of a sports game kinda guy.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Skate-Castelo” by zeibalsero . Used under creative commons license.)
Hearts of Iron IV is on sale for ten bucks on Steam, and I keep eyeballing it…but it looks faaaaaaaar to complicated for me to actually enjoy. I still need to finish the last operation in the Legacy Operations pack on XCOM 2 (the attraction here is listening to Bradford tell war stories–they’ve masterfully captured the aura of soldiers telling stories and not quite getting all the details right). Otherwise I’m just collecting achievements in BB 2 and thinking about snagging 2 Point Hospital (remember Theme Hospital?) while it’s on sale.Report
Guys, guys, guys. Seriously. You have to check out this board game Humble Bundle. Computer versions of multiple *AWESOME* board games (ported to computer) for $12.
Carcassonne and all of its DLC (and the base game by itself is awesome… I’ve talked about Carcassonne before here).
Small World and all of its DLC (and the base game by itself is awesome I’ve talked about Small World before here).
Both of those are good games in their own right.
*BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE*
This bundle includes Mysterium (a cooperative deduction game), Love Letter (a competitive game about getting your love letter into the hands of Princess Annette whilst blocking the love letters of your competitors), Twilight Struggle (a game where you’re either the USA or the USSR and you replay the Cold War), Scythe (an awesome game set in an alternate history 1920s where you’re building your farms and trying to turn them into an industrial engine), Splendor (a board game about jewel trading that I’ve heard nothing but good things about and I’m pleased to finally get to play it at my own pace), and the Lord of the Rings card game (I know little about it but I know I liked Magic and it’s got decent reviews).
Out of all of those last games I mention, I’ve only played Scythe and I’ve only played it once so I can’t really endorse any of them… BUT THE BUNDLE IS TWELVE BUCKS. Holy cow! The Lord of the rings game all by itself is $20.
If you like board games, you *NEED* to get over there and check this bundle out.Report
And there are two more games I forgot to mention!
Kings and Assassins
Patchwork
I’ve not played either but, seriously, this bundle is out of this world.Report
Okay, Patchwork is one of the toughest 1v1 board game I’ve played. The basic idea is this: you have a 9×9 quilt. You need to patch it in a limited time period. Some of the patches have buttons. All of the patches take time to patch onto your quilt. Each patch is a different shape that has between 2 and 8 squares on it (there might be two 4-square L shapes but, seriously, all of the other shapes are unique). Each patch requires a certain number of buttons to purchase (and some are more expensive than others). Every time you pass a checkpoint on the timer, you get paid a number of buttons that are on your quilt so far. Oh, and you get a bonus if a 7×7 square on your 9×9 square is completely covered.
And I cannot even come close to consistently beating the AI set on the easy setting. I’m always short of buttons. When I do win, it’s by 3 or 4 points and when it wins, it’s usually in the teens.
And there’s no asymmetric information, so it’s suitable for a hotseat game.
I’m pleased to have picked up this game. Seriously, check out this bundle.Report
What I find with games like this is you just have to play them a lot and each time, try to emphasize one thing — play to get all the Resources of one type, play to get as wide a diversity of resources as possible, play to make a “blob” of area, play to spread as wide an area as possible, go for the bonus scores, ignore the bonus scores entirely; and explore how each of those affects your options during play. Like, break the gameplay in various ways and see what the pieces look like. Maybe “the nation that controls Red controls the universe”, maybe castling up in Australia is the best play, maybe you should rush for the bonus points and then fill in the rest as endgame play.Report
It’s an engine building game and buttons are the engine. Due to how my brain works, I look at the quilt and say “I need to tetris that thing up” but I don’t know if it’s even technically possible to make a full quilt.
But I finally reach the point where I can consistently beat “easy” and I cross over to “medium” and I’ve got no idea what I’m doing again.Report
Something I’m not clear on: If I buy that bundle for myself, how do I play the games with other people?
Do all the people I want to play with need to own the same game? Or can we only do multi-player by sharing the same computer?Report
I haven’t tested all of the games but if you want to play multiplayer online, both people need to own the game. Without both people owning the game, yeah, you’re stuck with local hotseat multiplayer.Report
ah, I see. Thank you!
I do like Jackbox games, only one player needs to own the actual game and shares their screen via a Zoom call; the other players get sent links that open a client on their smartphone/tablet/computer without them needing to own the actual game.Report