Tony Hawk Project 8

[mewelke]

Well I played for an hour and had no fun. I used to like the games in this series, then the last version, don't even remember its name, it seemed like the game had undergone a fun removal or a funendectomy or something. I see that they haven't put the fun back in.

[Brian Reed]

I was really intrigued by the "two sticks = two feet build your own combo" mechanics, but it rapidly went from feeling like an exciting new bit of gameplay to feeling like a proof of concept. I think I played about an hour the night I got my copy and it hasn't seen my disc drive since.

[mewelke]

I was really intrigued by the "two sticks = two feet build your own combo" mechanics, but it rapidly went from feeling like an exciting new bit of gameplay to feeling like a proof of concept.

Yup. And something that is not limited to Tony Hawk but often seems to come out of Activision published games: there are relatively simple controls presented in the tutorial that I'm apparently not dextrous enough to do. I had tons of fun playing TH a couple of versions ago, but apparently I'm not good enough to play their new games. Back to Gamefly with this.

[Ascius]

Dude... I had trouble with the tutorial... they ask you to string together some shit that took me a while to get to happen.

I ended up playing the fuck out of the game over the course of two sessions or so though... not all the way through it, but I'd started getting proficient enough to get a couple sick rankings on some of the easier challenges.

The game is seriously hard, so for people who want a steep challenge to ram against, it's perfect... admittedly as we get older we don't go for that shit, but sometimes it's still fun, and kids love that sort of shit.

[Noodle]

Im curious to see how the new EA skate game is going to come out. It would be nice to have a little competition for Mr. Hawk once in a while.

[Brian Reed]

I find now that I'm not game industry day in day out, I'm starting to enjoy a lot of games a lot more. I'm also starting to enjoy things that are a bit harder than I used to. For example, Rainbow Six Vegas is a harsh mistress.

With Hawk, I can never shake the feeling that they make games the Metal Gear Way(tm) "You've been here since #1, or we don't want you here now."

[mewelke]

There are certainly games where I believe the target audience is looking for a difficulty in excess of what I enjoy. Rainbow 6 is a good example. I checked it out because hot damn it's purdy, but I knew damned well that wasn't my kind of game. Ninja Gaiden, another example. I never thought this about the Tony Hawk series though. One of the smarter things I remember from Blizzard was the general line of thinking that qualification to play the game should run as such: "do you have fifty dollars? If yes you are good enough to play our game." And several of the Tony Hawk games seemed to follow the same philosophy. Sure I wasn't able to do all the tricks on command, but that didn't mean that the game creators were going to deny me the fun of rail sliding my way through an airport or bursting through the window of a haunted house. I miss that.