Month of Video Games Day 13: A game you've played more than five times.

Day 13: A game you've played more than 5 times
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

(for purposes of this, I'm counting playing through all levels with 5 skaters as playing the game more than 5 times. If you don't think that counts... I dunno, you're weird)



I've never ridden a skateboard in my life. I don't really know anything about actual skateboarding. Luckily, that doesn't really matter to enjoy the Tony Hawk games (the early ones at least), which are really more about what skating would be like in a world where the laws of gravity were much more tenuous, falling about six stories onto concrete is mostly a minor inconvenience, and Wolverine occasionally shows up. Like actual skateboarding, (hey, I know at least this much) a big part of the appeal is kind new, cool lines to try out, it's just that here your lines might include jumping out of the window of a building, grinding the baggage claim at an airport, or ollieing into a haunted house. The game is kind of like Super Metroid in that it has an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master thing going on. Completing enough goals to work your way through the ten or levels in the game is pretty simple, but being good enough to do ridiculousness like this is another matter. It's hard to really get sick of the game, because there's really not much of an upper bound as to how good you can be. If you pull off a million point combo, there's always a way to get to a million and a half by tacking on a few more moves.

The gameplay in Tony Hawk games is truly pretty unique. I guess when it comes down to it, it's mostly about timing and hitting the right button at the right time like anything else, but I in THPS you have the quick switching between the balance of holding a grind and the quick twitch of getting the best possible rotation on a vert move. I guess there have been other "extreme sports" type games out there, but none that I've played have the polish and intuitiveness that the Tony Hawk games have. All of the early games are fantastic, but I singled out 3 because I think it represents when they'd installed pretty much all of the major gameplay elements, but before it started to devolve into sillyness. THPS2 added manualing, where you could tap up and down and balance off the back of your board on flat ground as part of a combo. THPS3 took that one step further and added the revert, where you could tap a shoulder button (R2, if I recall?) at the right time, and go into a manual right from a vert move so you could mosey of the halfpipe or whatever you were in and find a rail to keep your combo going. After THPS3, the stuff they added just seemed superfluous and dumb, like special moves you could do on flat ground that you could do in succession in between spinning your board such that you could literally get hundreds of thousands of points by pretty much staying in one spot. Which really isn't in the spirit of the game at all, I don't think. And after the third game, they ditched the 2:00 time limit and opened the game up more, giving you goals through MMO sort of quests. One would think that this would make the game more interesting, but it actually kind of just made it more tedious, especially when they added a bunch of quests that have nothing to do with skating and have you riding a leaf blower around (seriously, I distinctly remember that being a quest). Really, the 2:00 time limit never bothered me much, because doing 2:00 runs never really got old.

There were at least a dozen skaters in THPS3, each with different move sets, and it was fun playing through the game with all of them. Each time, you'd end up achieving something through a little bit different means, grabbing one extra goal in a run, and generally just doing more impressive things than before. I have a lot of good memories passing the controller between friends running through the game with absolutely every character. One of the more replayable games out there.

Might combine these next 2 since they're easy and I've skipped a few days along the way:

Day 14 - Current (or most recent) gaming wallpaper.
Day 15 - Post a screenshot from the game you’re playing right now.