Earn enough points and you could play baseball with a board as Star Wars' favourite New Zealand bounty hunter Jango Fett (remember him?) or Iron Maiden's Eddie The Head. What's more, spine transfers arrived, allowing you to hop from one pipe to another, racking up colossal combos in the process. Level objectives became genuinely difficult, making their completion punch-the-air-and-kiss-the-dog satisfying.
Greetings, expansive all-skateable universe! With levels too big to be limited by such a clumsy dimension as time, THPS4 let players roam at leisure, free to careen down Alcatraz in a shopping trolley or nosebone into an inflatable bullseye for as long as they wanted. Over 15 years later, alas, and the limited gameplay and PS1's creaky graphics age it badly.īegone, two-minute timer. Who thought an arcade-style skateboard sim would be this playable, this nuanced, this… fun?Īnd while skating games weren't a new concept, this utterly addictive newcomer created its very own genre of reality-bending button-bashing, leaving players awake until the small hours desperately trying to get the floating E in S-K-A-T-E in the allocated time. It's funny to think that the first release in the Tony Hawk back catalogue was a "surprise hit". Larger and more colourful than ever before, this boasted the revolutionary ability of being able to get off your board. Sure, the plot was as thin as Changing Rooms-era MDF, but it actively had one, and what's more, there was an actual difficulty setting so you could really, really, really show off.
Teaming up with your annoyingly voiced best buddy Eric – who you'll eventually learn to loathe with the fiery passion of a thousand suns – you start grinding the greasy pole to superstardom in a revolutionary new concept for the franchise: a story. Where once you played a real-life pro, you now play a regular schmo (who wants to become a real-life pro). This was also the first time you could bust out a "sticker slap" to propel you off walls, and so into bins, or plate glass, or a little old lady walking her dog. Your main aim here isn't to execute perfect tricks – it's to break stuff and junk. You'll meet Steve-O riding a mechanical bull, skate alongside Benjamin Franklin, and balance lawnmowers on rails while dressed as a clown. Undeniably the silliest THPS game ever released, Underground 2 centres on Jackass veteran Bam Margera's passion for wanton destruction, with the comedy setting stuck permanently on "ZOINKS!" That said, the introduction of slow-motion mode "nail the trick" added a welcome layer of nuance to gameplay, and the casting of skater-turned-actor Jason Lee as your coach was an inspired choice as, let's face it, Rodney Mullen and co can't act for pudding.
If only wobbly frame rates and yet-more bugs – particularly on the PS3 – hadn't come along for the ride, this could have been more like the "early, fun ones".
The first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game to be built from the ground up for the Xbox 360 and PS3 era, Project 8 had all-new trick animations that looked significantly better than anything that came before.
Perhaps the first clear signal that the once great franchise had a few trucks loose. Try it on the Xbox 360, meanwhile, and the higher resolution only emphasised the ropeyness of the previously passable graphics.
Ride around a massive Los Angeles, free from loading times and blessed with an actual kinda-sorta storyline! Upgrade your own skate park! Hop on a BMX for a bit! Get off your board and, um, swing it at passers-by!Īmerican Wasteland gave players more freedom and more tricks – including the surf-like "bert slide" – but was just a little too simple, turning off newcomers and seasoned pros alike. Dig hard enough and the core joy of executing a 900 degree Christ Air was still there, but under a lot of glitchy extras that didn't add all that they should.
Overcomplicated and just a little shonky, even-more-of-the-same Proving Ground was no disaster, but paled in comparison to the new kid on the block, Skate (which eventually beat it in sales).Īfter eight games over eight years, developers Neversoft kept adding new technical doodahs to the franchise – Learn how to rig up a skatepark! Set up your own camera shots! – and lost the fun of it all. Violently disagree? Mildly disagree? Feel like, say, Underground 2 deserves to be higher up? Be sure to let us know. disappointing, but that doesn't stop the original editions from being classics of their kind, as our ranked list proves. Sure, early reactions to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 may be. The arrival of the tenth official main Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game - leaving aside the gimmicky Ride, Shred and Downhill Jam spin-offs - has sent Digital Spy on a never-ending combo of gaming nostalgia.