When I was but a lad, there was one game that me and my cousins fought over more than any other: Tony Hawk’s Proskater 2 on the original PlayStation. In real life, we couldn’t even figure the mechanics behind an ollie and gave up after our first fracture but when we picked up a controller, we were transformed into gods of the skate park, capable of falling from hundreds of feet in the air with no harm and capable of pulling off combos of tricks that would make an X-games announcer’s eyes bleed from the beauty of what he or she was bearing witness to. While we couldn’t stand most sports games, this game became more important than life itself and pretty much made the year 2000 for us and all of us picked up the surprisingly good GBA port the next year. However, after Pro Skater 2, we stopped following the series as carefully and moved on to other games. Fast forward to today, where Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD, a game which takes remade maps from the first two games in the series and has the play mechanics of Pro skater 2, is released to kick off Xbox Live Arcade’s “Summer of Arcade.” So, does it stack up? Is it a wonderful trip down memory lane, or has the franchise aged like milk?

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is the latest entry in the long skateboarding game franchise. The game is mostly a remake, since it revisits several old maps, but it has been updated with new skaters, high-def graphics, and some new songs. The core gameplay, the career mode, is the same: go to a level as one of ten skaters (almost all of them real life professionals) and perform various acts of vandalism and item-collection while trying to beat high-scores by performing special moves and combos. This will let you unlock more levels, modes, boards, and cheats to play around with. The game has some light RPG elements since you can improve a skater’s stats and select and map special moves to your character. While it is pretty much the same game as back in the day, there have been some changes.

SCHOOL II: A LEVEL FILLED WITH PRODUCT PLACEMENT, AWESOME STUNTS, AND A SOCIOPATHIC SECURITY DRIVER.

So what exactly has changed since the old days? Well, in addition to the HD Texture Update, the game has mashed together maps from Pro Skater 1+2 that were selected by fan voting. The maps that ended up from the first two games are Warehouse, The Hangar, School II, The Mall, Venice Beach, (Phoenix) Downhill Jam, and Marseille. It should be noted that the developers have said maps for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 will be added as DLC in the future but the gameplay is out of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, meaning that you can’t pull off reverts on the maps though you can perform manuals on Pro Skater 1 maps. In addition, instead of getting VHS tapes from completing goals, you now just complete the goals and try to find a secret DVD on each level (oh how times have changed). There also have been a few goals added; before, in the Phoenix Downhill Jam level, you could break valves off of pipes and have water flood parts of the levels, now there is an added goal to manual through the puddles caused by the water being released. There have also been Skaters like Riley Hawk and the ability to play as your avatar (which is a feature I had way too much fun with) added in addition to several new songs which have been added to the soundtracks of both games. Overall, there’s been enough changed to keep the game from being just a simple retread and should be pretty refreshing for old and new players alike.

Luckily, regardless of experience, any gamer can get into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD with little problem. Mapping and performing special moves are a cinch and, while there is no tutorial, a help section details some of the more essential moves and explains the various modes you can play through. The controls are also just as responsive as they were back in in the day, so the only challenge you’ll have pulling the tricks and combos off is learning how to properly use quarter and half-pipes to pull off tricks and how to land from some tricks. You can also buy and map new special tricks at the skate shop with money you’ve earned from playing the various modes in the game so there’s a fair amount of customization as well. One thing to note however is that each skater has his or her on progression: if you unlock a level with one character, it won’t be unlocked for another. However, any modes or cheats that are unlocked are unlocked for all characters.

MALL: A LEVEL THAT REALLY HATES MAPS.

Speaking of modes, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD has revived a fairly healthy selection. In addition to Career, where you have two minutes each run to try and complete one or multiple goals to gain money and unlock new levels, there is also Single Session, in which you have two minutes to get the best score you can on a map and then post it online, and Free Skate, where you can just practice a map for as long as you want. As you play, you can also unlock Big head Survival (my personal favorite), a mode where you have an expanding noggin and must perform tricks to keep it shrunken down, Hawkman, where maps are littered with multi-colored dots, and you have to perform a certain action to pick up each type, and Projectives, which is like Career mode but only gives you 1 minute to tackle new goals for each level. Multiplayer lets you play Graffiti, where players compete to ‘tag’ the most objects by performing tricks on them and can also steal objects from other players by performing highter scoring tricks on objects, Trick Attack, where you try to just have the highest score by the end, and Big Head Elimination, which is a Big Head Survival with the last person to have his or her head explode wins. In any case, there’s plenty of things to do in this game when you get bored of Career mode.

Aesthetically, the HD update is an improvement most of time but there are a couple of off putting things. For example, while the skaters look great and highly detailed and most of the levels came out looking comparatively just as good as their previous incarnations or even better, the Venice Beach level came out looking terrible. The reason for this is that they changed the time from midday to sunset, which bathes the level in an orange light. This wouldn’t be too bad but the developers decided to make quite a bit of the level orange already and the sand around the level is that ugly brown that is often attributed to military FPSs. Toss in some putrid green fences and the level becomes a mess. This type of color scheme is also used in the Phoenix level but at least that one is set at night, so the contrast between the colors and the sky kind of works. While this may seem like a nitpick, the color choices are used in a third of the game and make the Venice Beach level look worse than it did two console generations ago.

DOWNHILL JAM: A LEVEL FILLED WITH DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY AND PIPE-RIDING ACTION.

Another, more nit picking, problem is a couple of song-selections and the font size on the trick list (no, seriously). While most of the songs are taken from Pro Skater 1+2 the developers added several songs to keep the music from being a complete retread. While most of the songs fit in very nicely, Lateef the Truthspeaker’s “We the People” does tend to clash with the skateboarding gameplay, more for its chorus than verses, and it sounds awkward when you’re popping a massive combo and jumping over magic, teleporting, bums. Then there’s Powerman 5000’s “When World’s Collide.” While this was included on Pro Skater 2, it’s definitely a song that hasn’t aged well since my first thought isn’t “badass song” but rather, “song that’s been used in over a thousand AMV’s and “Little Nicky.” Even back in the day, the song clashed with what was on screen, since, while pulling off a sweet trick on a quarter-pipe before performing a VB transfer is pretty awesome, a guy screaming “Are you going with me? cause I’m going with you” doesn’t really fit. The font-size is another choice I don’t understand. In the original game, as you performed more and more tricks, the screen would explode with text, making really skilled players capable of filling a fourth of the screen; which was a nice touch that was even done in the GBA port. Instead, the developers decided to use a much smaller font-size that is nice and neat. It’s perfectly readable but it lacks that certain bombastic feeling the old font brought. Ultimately, though these are just nitpicks and, since a recent patch fixed the glitches in the game, I had to search for something to find as a problem out side of the lack of local play.

Overall, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a great start to Summer of Arcade. While it is obviously trying to bank on nostalgia for the franchise to get sales, it adds enough, though just enough, to keep the old games from feeling stale. More importantly though, the game controls just as well as it always did and it’s jam-packed with hours of gameplay and modes, so you’ll easily get more than your money’s worth. Whether you’re an old fan or new to the series, you have to give this game a play.

A review copy of this game was provided by the publisher and played for about 12 hours. The game was played on the Xbox 360 but will be available later this year on the PlayStation 3 and PC.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD Review

By Gabriel B.

So, fan selected levels from the greatest skateboarding games of all time remade in HD with some new songs and skaters? Sounds fun.