Saturday Morning Gaming: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2

I mentioned how I pre-ordered Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 the second it was announced. Well, it showed up! I was completely taken aback. Is it September 4th already? Oh, my goodness. I see that it was.

Well, I loaded it up and it had to download about a gig of stuff and immediately I was whisked back to the heady days of 2001 and I was playing Tony Hawk all over again.

Except I had forgotten how to do pretty much EVERYTHING. Sure, I tell myself, the last time I played this, it was with a maxed-out skater from Tony Hawk’s Underground. Now I’m playing with a n00b skater that has n00b skater stats. Yeah, that’s what I tell myself. So I got into the tutorial and I slowly but surely started remembering again. Okay. Jump by releasing X. Triangle button has you grind a rail. Square for flips, Circle for grabs. And chain them together to get the big points. Do a manual. Do a revert. Do a trick, a revert, then a manual. Jump into a grind. Crash into concrete. Start over again.

And then, after finishing the tutorial, I felt like I could finally do the first area and not feel awful. And it was a time warp.

I had forgotten that the game is set up in two-minute increments. You can do whatever you want, but you have to do it in two minutes. You feel like collecting all 5 letters in S-K-A-T-E? Feel free. Hey, get them in any order you care for. Just do it in two minutes. Or maybe you’ll want to smash up the boxes. Maybe you’ll want to get a big final score. Maybe you’ll want to get a big combo score. Just do it in two minutes. And I played and it slowly came back to me.

Here’s an event on the second level, for example. You’re skateboarding around a school and there are a bunch of things to get. Collect the SKATE letters. Collect 5 textbooks. Here’s me trying, and failing, to wall ride on top of 5 bells:

Trying to get 5 bells and almost succeeding. pic.twitter.com/MOaWkR5pfQ

— Jaybird (@OG_Jaybird) September 11, 2020

I tried again and, this time, I succeeded:

Succeeding. pic.twitter.com/6WFPJ6JORS

— Jaybird (@OG_Jaybird) September 11, 2020

WHEW. Seriously, I’d been trying to do that for a good long while. (For one thing, I had to figure out WHERE the five bells were. Then I had to figure how to get to each one in time to wall ride them. And then I had to not mess up (the hardest part).)

After I finally accomplished it, I thought “Hey, I should take some of my cash and buy a new hoodie in celebration!”

Buying a new hoodie in celebration. pic.twitter.com/K9X0IwrrNh

— Jaybird (@OG_Jaybird) September 11, 2020

This brings me to my main complaint about the game. Sure, there’s a build-a-skater part of the game but you can’t change the body type of your skater. I want to skate with a fat skater. On top of that, there isn’t an option to give glasses to your skater. That’s not on the menu either. (Neither do they have Doc Martens in the shoe shop which strikes me as kinda nuts, given what I remember about the skaters in the 80’s.)

But not being able to make a fat bespectacled skater isn’t THAT much of a dealbreaker.

Anyway, much of the game is not doing the missions where you have to wall ride on top of school bells or bust up boxes. Most of the game is in a nail-biting frenzy of trying to get a certain amount of points via combos. Do a move, that’s worth X points and now string another move on top of that and now it’s X+Y points times 2. Put another in there and it’s X+Y+Z times 3. If you crash? Bail out? You lose ALL of the points up to that point. So you constantly have to ask yourself “do I want to cash in my points or try just one more move and get another multiplier on there?”

And then you can say “welp, I guess I should have cashed them in”. Here’s an example of me trying to get the Sick Score of 125,000 at the school:

A !sick combo. pic.twitter.com/xjizbGfgHo

— Jaybird (@OG_Jaybird) September 11, 2020

Eh, I’ll get it next time. Hey, it’s only two minutes an attempt, right?

Anyway, if you’re someone who played Tony Hawk 3 back in 2001 and miss it, or are someone who loved Tony Hawk’s Under Ground game, or never really got into it at the time but, hey, there’s a quarantine still going on and you’re looking for something awesome that isn’t people shooting each other, you should pick this up. It’s an amazing game, a lotta fun, and you can customize your character and get one that looks mostly like you, kinda. Well, you can’t make your skater fat. Or nearsighted. But other than that, you can make an avatar that looks pretty much like you and have even more fun skating around, two minutes at a time.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 box art.)