You do not have to be a skater to enjoy Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater; you must simply like to have fun. That is the only requirement for the game, and that is exactly why this franchise is so phenomenally successful. With incarnations on the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, one could claim that the series has gotten out of hand, but each new Tony Hawk game arrives with a handful of great reviews.
In fact, the only Tony Hawk games to receive less acclaim than normal were the unsophisticated Game Boy Color versions and the recent release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on PS One. This is because the game was meant for a much more advanced platform.
For the most part, though, the series has been making incredible advancements over the years, each time taking the public by surprise. The original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater redefined the genre. Skating games in the past had been plagued with problems and unreliable game play.
Getting the motion and physics down is not an easy thing to do in a 3D game, but Neversoft finally perfected it in the fall of 1999 with the original release on the PlayStation. The game was an incredible hit.
The second in the series, surprisingly, took the franchise to new heights. It is rare for a sequel to outdo the original, but the graphical and game play innovations that Neversoft instilled in the game made it even more successful than the first. Also, when the game was later released on the Sega Dreamcast with a fresh coat of paint, it was even better received, and the publishers made millions.
Since then, more incarnations of the series have spawned on other systems, including an amazing version of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 on the Game Boy Advance.
It is incredibly hard to keep a franchise popular to the consumer after so many iterations. As seen in films like Scream 3 and Jurassic Park 3, it is very tough to keep people interested in something without it feeling like overkill.
Because or this, many felt a bit trepid about the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 on the PlayStation 2.
For starters, this is the first version of the game to be on this platform, and gamers were anxious to see if Neversoft could once again top itself. Can it really be better than the first and second ones?
Amazingly, critics are saying “yes,” and for many reasons. The most obvious reason is how beautiful the game looks. Taking the series from the 32-bit PlayStation to the 128-bit PlayStation 2 has done a lot for the game, including making the motion much more fluid–at a near constant 60 frames per second–as well as smoothing out the character animations during the tricks (or accidents resulting from a failed trick).
The PS2 also has more available space for polygons and textures, so the skate parks and cities look much better and more realistic. There is also a lot more environmental interaction with people and cars busy on the city streets.
On the game play side, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 boasts a slew of new tricks. Some of them are hilariously funny, simply because they couldn’t be pulled off in real life–not even by Tony Hawk himself.
All of the old tricks resurface on the new game, and a new trick called the revert allows for even greater trick combinations–expect to beat all of the old scores that might have been achieved in the older games.
The level and character editors have also been greatly tweaked. Characters can now be designed from the ground up, based on build, gender, skin tone and more. There is also a great variety of accessories that can be tacked on–from shoes, socks, shirts, pants, hats, glasses, bracelets and nearly anything else one could think of.
The level editor offers many new surfaces and motifs to create more original skate parks to play around on, but they cannot be used in a multiplayer match.
In multiplayer mode, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is the first online game to ever come out for the PlayStation 2. Although the network adapter (MSRP of $40) is not out yet, when it does arrive, gamers will be able to play each other over the Internet in a variety of multiplayer games.
The network adapter supports both Ethernet and dial-up connections, so everyone with an Internet connection should be able to play online with others.
It should be noted that while the PlayStation 2 is the first next generation console that the game is hitting, it will not be the last. Although it won’t be playable online, a GameCube version will be released alongside the GameCube’s launch on November 18. An Xbox version is also planned with online capabilities, but will not be released until the Xbox’s network is ready to go–likely sometime next spring. Of course, for Xbox fans, there is always Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2x.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was released to stores nationwide on Wednesday, and is available for approximately $49.99. A PlayStation version is also available, and is playable on the PlayStation 2 console.