I like it, I wanted to like it more.
I picked this game up because I felt I should at least try all ten of the all-time top-rated games on Metacritic; I had already decided that I was going to play one of the SoulCalibur sequels instead of the original, so I let my impatience get the best of me and downloaded the Tony Hawk remaster instead of waiting for the old discs to come in the mail. I had some sense that I might have made a mistake, and after playing through the remaster far enough to get all 6 medals and nearly max out my create-a-skate character's stats I think my gut was right.
I never really played the Tony Hawk games when I was a kid. I watched my brother play them, but I couldn't really understand what he was doing and had no idea how to pull off any moves or combos. I remember almost every time we went to a particular cousins' house we would all end up passing around the controller for Tony Hawk 3, and the Underground and Wasteland games seemed to be the ones that most commonly graced our own screen at home. Watching somebody else play Tony Hawk, it has a deceptive effortlessness; playing Tony Hawk, the particulars of the execution requires disguise how simple it really is.
The earliest games in the series are even more simple, not just in terms of more limited moveset or (presumably) smaller levels, but in the number of goals and the heights of expectations. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater has such compact levels with so few objectives littered throughout that beating all of them in a single 2-minute session seems well within the upper bounds of even the casual skill ceiling.
But even if you staple those first two games together, that could be less than a half-an-hour of content, with clunkier gameplay than fans are accustomed to on account of the more recent games. So, this game adds in the additional tricks and combo potential, but it doesn't stop there. It more than doubles the number of objectives per skatepark, it also massively inflates things like expected scores.
The high score challenge in the first stage of THPS1 is 5,000. The pro score is 15,000.
In the remaster, the high score is 10,000, the pro score is 50,000, and there is a third "sick" score to beat, 100,000.
But another thing to consider: doing all the objectives in a single run in the originals was a cool thing you could do. In the remaster, it's basically expected that you'll learn this. In fact, the remaster expects you to do quite a bit more than just play and beat the game. Re-emphasizing that I have "beaten" every level in the game, I have done about 30 or so of the more than 800 challenges in the game. Of course, plenty of these challenges are for things like the online multiplayer and course creation, but these are fistfuls of worms that I should probably scoop back into the original can that I opened a few paragraphs ago.
Tony Hawk's appeal, to me, is simplicity. This game is really complicated. In the old games, the low polygon count and the sparse number of objects make it so much easier to deduce what you can interact with, what your objectives are. In the original, you'll destroy big red signs; in the remaster, they're small, thin, and blend almost entirely into their surroundings.
In the original, you collect giant letters because it's a video game. In the remaster, the giant letters are holograms; the other floating objects you collect, fire hydrants, hard hats, toy robots, they're all holograms; when you wipe out and skip the animation to quickly re-mount your board, your character is a hologram. I'd guess it's some kind of bizarre attempt at realism, to dull the blow of the potentially immersion-breaking "gamey-ness" of these things, but it raises so many more questions than it answers, and the original questions could be so easily and satisfactorily answered by one simple truth: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a video game.
I picked this game up because I felt I should at least try all ten of the all-time top-rated games on Metacritic; I had already decided that I was going to play one of the SoulCalibur sequels instead of the original, so I let my impatience get the best of me and downloaded the Tony Hawk remaster instead of waiting for the old discs to come in the mail. I had some sense that I might have made a mistake, and after playing through the remaster far enough to get all 6 medals and nearly max out my create-a-skate character's stats I think my gut was right.
I never really played the Tony Hawk games when I was a kid. I watched my brother play them, but I couldn't really understand what he was doing and had no idea how to pull off any moves or combos. I remember almost every time we went to a particular cousins' house we would all end up passing around the controller for Tony Hawk 3, and the Underground and Wasteland games seemed to be the ones that most commonly graced our own screen at home. Watching somebody else play Tony Hawk, it has a deceptive effortlessness; playing Tony Hawk, the particulars of the execution requires disguise how simple it really is.
The earliest games in the series are even more simple, not just in terms of more limited moveset or (presumably) smaller levels, but in the number of goals and the heights of expectations. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater has such compact levels with so few objectives littered throughout that beating all of them in a single 2-minute session seems well within the upper bounds of even the casual skill ceiling.
But even if you staple those first two games together, that could be less than a half-an-hour of content, with clunkier gameplay than fans are accustomed to on account of the more recent games. So, this game adds in the additional tricks and combo potential, but it doesn't stop there. It more than doubles the number of objectives per skatepark, it also massively inflates things like expected scores.
The high score challenge in the first stage of THPS1 is 5,000. The pro score is 15,000.
In the remaster, the high score is 10,000, the pro score is 50,000, and there is a third "sick" score to beat, 100,000.
But another thing to consider: doing all the objectives in a single run in the originals was a cool thing you could do. In the remaster, it's basically expected that you'll learn this. In fact, the remaster expects you to do quite a bit more than just play and beat the game. Re-emphasizing that I have "beaten" every level in the game, I have done about 30 or so of the more than 800 challenges in the game. Of course, plenty of these challenges are for things like the online multiplayer and course creation, but these are fistfuls of worms that I should probably scoop back into the original can that I opened a few paragraphs ago.
Tony Hawk's appeal, to me, is simplicity. This game is really complicated. In the old games, the low polygon count and the sparse number of objects make it so much easier to deduce what you can interact with, what your objectives are. In the original, you'll destroy big red signs; in the remaster, they're small, thin, and blend almost entirely into their surroundings.
In the original, you collect giant letters because it's a video game. In the remaster, the giant letters are holograms; the other floating objects you collect, fire hydrants, hard hats, toy robots, they're all holograms; when you wipe out and skip the animation to quickly re-mount your board, your character is a hologram. I'd guess it's some kind of bizarre attempt at realism, to dull the blow of the potentially immersion-breaking "gamey-ness" of these things, but it raises so many more questions than it answers, and the original questions could be so easily and satisfactorily answered by one simple truth: Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is a video game.