Tony Hawk's Project 8

Aug. 16, 2008

Skateboarding games are simply not something I would ever pick up on my own. I mean, how fun can skateboarding simulators be? So I got a random one off the shelf, Tony Hawk's Project 8.

Category

Skateboarding Simulator

Pros

• Once you get in the groove of the game, skateboarding is just plain fun. Going back and forth on a half pipe, pulling tricks on either side, it feels great.
• There are tons of controls, allowing you to really go all out with your tricks. The "make a move" simulator is also really fun.
• Lots of tutorials on all the mechanics of the game saved me from a long session with a manual.
• The career mode has a lot of good challenges, and allows you to really work your way up. You don't have to start as a pro, in other words, so it was just right for me.
• The hospital bill meter, which shows up whenever you faceplant, is hilarious. I don't know how I did it but once I got a $17k hospital bill (most are around the $10-1000 range).

Cons

• The controls are a mouthful. There are so many things you can do it makes the game really hard to come to grips with. The payoff for this is much further down the line, but initially it makes the game frustrating. I doubt I learned an eighth of what you can do.
• The tutorial was pretty obviously written by someone who was already an expert at the game. Some of the tests it had you do were so difficult that I could not do them in the least. Manual for 5 seconds, and then land it, sounds really easy to a pro, but it took me five minutes just to get those five seconds. Argh!
• The game assumes knowledge of skateboarding, so the terminology went way over my head. This happened a lot in the tutorial, where it would tell me to "pull an X" and I would have no idea what an X was. I couldn't complete one of the tutorials because I didn't realize that an Impossible is done on a half pipe, not while grinding. The same problem came up with Moto GP; there's GOT to be a way to convey terminology to those who are new to the system.
• Some unskippable cutscenes. The worst is the beginning - you hit start to begin, then it forces you to watch 45 seconds of skating for no reason. I just want to play the game.
• The whole game seems to just be a big promotional vehicle for Tony Hawk, which I found a little annoying. I'm not a watcher of skateboarding so I don't know who Hawk is, besides his line of games. As a result, all the praise of him that goes on in the game seems hollow.

Verdict

I was pleasantly surprised at how much fun the core mechanic of skateboarding is, once you get a grip on it. I would have no qualms with picking this game up again sometime and playing through more of the career mode.