Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

"Tony Hawk's Pro Skater for the N64 is a really excellent game....... get it on the Dreamcast if you can though : )"

Introduction
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Everyone who is a gamer knows of the great Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. So far Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (or both) has/have graced the Playstation, GameBoy Color, Nintendo 64, GameBoy Advance, Dreamcast and PC….. soon Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games will have hit the Playstation 2, Xbox and GameCube, as well as more versions on other platforms.

This is a sure sign that If nothing else, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has had an enormous influence on gaming. But surely, the games wouldn’t have been so popular for no reason at all….

Initially, Activision released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the Playstation, within months it had became one of the best selling games ever. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater received excellent reviews for all areas of the gaming world. Activision realised very quickly that they had a winner, and soon assigned developers to work on port for the Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast.

Lets see how the Nintendo 64 port went eh?

Gameplay
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To sum it up, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater delivers the best skateboarding experience in a game, ever! It takes all of the elements of Skateboarding that make it what it is, and seemlessly translates them into a game.

The primary mode of gameplay is Career mode, which I’ll go into further shortly. The other modes are Single Session and Free Skate. In Single Session you skate a 2:00 run on any level you wish, usually you’ll be playing this for new high scores once you’ve mastered the game. Free skate is un-timed, and is great for looking for new gaps/transfers, secret areas and also great lines.

In Carrer mode, you can initially choose from Tony Hawk, Bob Burnquist, Geoff Rowley, Bucky Lasek, Chad Muska, Kareem Campbell, Andrew Reynolds, Rune Gilfberg, Jamie Thomas and Elissa Streamer. All are real Pro Skaters, and very good ones at that.

After you choose your skater you can choose from a number of different boards (many more will be unlockable later down the track), change the board’s wheel colour and fiddle with it’s turning.

When you’ve done all of that you are given initially, just one level to skate in. There are five goals per level for you to attempt to attain. First is a high score which won’t cause too much trouble, second is a differing objective for each level that usually involves you finding 5 object scattered about the place, third is “collect S-K-A-T-E” where you have to search the level for each of the five letters that spell skate, fourth is “find the secret tape” which, in each level is hidden away from the eye, and often in a very hard to find location, the last level by level objective is getting the Pro Score, which will be a real challenge.

There are six levels with the five objectives, along with three competition levels.
In the competition levels you skate three one minute rounds, aiming for the best possible score by combining variety, difficulty of tricks. Your two best rounds count, and to advance you need to come 3rd or better. Points are deducted bigtime, for falling in competitions too. To fully complete the game you’ll need to get gold medals in all of the competitions as well as collect every tape for each level.

Each of the levels is designed amazingly. You’ll skate through a warehouse at night time, through a public school, downhill in Phoenix, through a big shopping mall!, around downtown Minneapolis, all over San Francisco as well as in three specially designed competition skate parks.
The levels are really well designed, as I said, with plenty of well places rails to grind, walls to wallride, ramps to jump and halfpipes to get some huge air in.

The trick system is really well designed as well. Though an awesome addition (the manual) was added in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, that allowed combos to get **** loads bigger, and yet another in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has a great system as it is. It would take ages for me to explain however, and I don’t want to waste space with even more useless info (as if I haven’t already wasted enough :P).

Each new Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game just gets better and better, but the original game itself is awesome, and plays like a dream.

9.4/10

Graphics
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For an N64 game, at the time it came out Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater looked pretty nice. The textures are a bit blurry, and the fog isn’t very nice, but it looks much better than the Playstation version.

The levels are, for the most part, really big. This is cool, but it does end up adding fog, because the poor old N64 can’t quite handle displaying the entire levels all at once.

The frame-rate of the N64 version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater is a hell of a lot smoother than the playstation version’s.

All of the characters are very well animated, and carry a nice poly-count (for the N64 anyway :P). It is a pity about the pissy textures, but hey, the fog has been pushed back a lot more than on the playstation version, aaaaaaaaannd the framerate is much smoother on the N64 version.

With a little more effort THPS could have looked a fair bit better, but as it is it’s quite a treat on the eyes.

9.1/10

Sound
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Hmmmm….. There is good and bad news here… I’ll start with the bad, so I can get it out of the way, and concentrate on the good. If you expected the same sound track on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the N64, as is on the Playstation and Dreamcast version, you can think again. The songs, while all there, are unfortunately, butchered like all crap :P Lyrics are missing here and there, the songs are cut down, loop a fair bit, don’t sound all that great (compared to the playstation/dreamcast versions at least) and so on. You really shouldn’t expect any different though, I mean you can’t fit a good 10 or so full length songs on a cartridge the same size as was used for this game.

Now that the bad is out of the way, it’s on to the good. The sound track on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater rocks! You’ve got tracks from loads of different bands, including Primus, Goldfinger, Dead Kennedys, The Ernies, Speedealer, Suicidal Tendencies, The Suicide Machines and Unsane. You probably won’t like all of the songs in the game, but most of them are good, or great.

A couple of little facts for you, The sound tracks of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 are very different, some of the bands in the THPS2 sound track are Rage Against the Machine (the awesome guerilla radio), Papa Roach, Dub Pistols and Powerman 5000. Also, THPS2 for the N64 will feature full length songs, but won’t have all of the tracks found in the playstation, PC and Dreamcast versions. THPS has a lot of Rap and Rock, which is no where to be found in THPS.

Enough of the music, onto the sound effects! Hmmmmm I think the word “everything” can sum up the sound effects. There is a sound for everything. Grind a rail and hear the metal on metal grinding noise, jump of a rail and her the “shink” noise. You’ll hear the wheels of the board rolling along when they are on the ground, when you launch into the air you’ll hear the wheels of the board spinning freely. Smash through glass and you’ll hear it shatter, hit the ground with your face and you’ll hear about it too.

The sound effects are of pretty good quality too. Nice.

9.1/10

Multiplayer
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I always say games should have a multiplayer mode, even if it isn’t very good, because you’ll still get at least a few minutes of fun out of it. Good thing is that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater does have a few multiplayer modes to play, and they all rock.

My two favourites are Horse and Graffiti. In horse you select a word at the beginning of the game (as short or long as you want). You and a friend take it in turns playing. The first player tries to set the highest score possible, if the other player beats it, the first player gets a letter of the word, if the other player can’t beat it they get a letter of the word. The first person to spell out the entire word is told “You are a _ _ _ _ _ _” (whatever you made the word).

In graffiti you and a friend skate around at the same time. The idea is to trick off/on as many different places/objects as you can. When you grind a rail, do a trick of a ramp, grind a lip, trick of a kicker etc it will turn your colour, and becomes “yours”. If you wish, you can steal too, by doing a better trick on/off the object than the other person, if you do a better trick the object becomes yours. In the end the player with the most things “their” colour wins.

9.1/10

Originality
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Sure, there have been skating games in the past, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater not only was the best at it’s time (beaten only by new Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games), but totally revolutionises skating games. The trick system was unique, and brilliantly constructed. The levels were awesome, the tricks were just about all there, you had a big selection of REAL Pro Skaters to choose from, and the sound track is great.

9.6/10

Controls
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As expected, the controls are spot on, and very responsive. The N64 controller is great for the game, with the C-buttons assigned to jumping, and tricking, and the right shoulder button for spinning. Personally, I prefer the Dreamcast controller, but that’s just me.

A note, after getting used to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the Dreamcast, I really can’t play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the N64 at all…… it’s a pity, but these things happen.

9.2/10

Replayability
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After you’ve got all of the tapes in Career mode, you’ll want to go back and do it all again with each of the other skaters (including the bonus skaters). When you’re done with Career mode there are high scores to get. If you think that you are good getting 50 000, think again. The Pros can totally whoop scores like that.
When you need a break from attempting to get new high scores there is the awesome multiplayer mode, which will keep you busy for weeks.

9.3/10

Difficulty
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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has an odd learning curve. You’ll start off really bad, and won’t be able to score much more than 15 000 points on your best runs, but as time passes you will just get better and better, finding little tricks every once in a while. When you’ve got the hang of it Career mode won’t be too hard, with only a few things that will really have you stuck. But completing Career mode isn’t where the game ends, because there are high scores to be got….

Load Times
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Well, as expected THPS has NO LOAD TIMES. This is one thing that the Dreamcast and Playstation versions can’t boast.

Pros
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(_) The only Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater console game without load times :p
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Cons
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(_) I pretty much can’t play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the Nintendo 64 after playing the crap out of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 on the Dreamcast :P
(_) The music is a bit cut down, and not of the same quality as the music on the Dreamcast and Playstation versions
(_) The bloody has been removed from the N64 version >_<
(_) No skater movies

Buy/rent
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BUY!…………. On the Dreamcast. If you don’t have a dreamcast, and have to choose between THPS on the N64, or not at all then grab a copy for the N64. It’s a great game, the Nintendo 64 version is better than the playstation, but has got NOTHING on the Dreamcast incarnation. I own the N64 version, and have played both the playstation and dreamcast versions of the game, so I do know what I am talking about. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, on whatever platform is a brilliant game, and a must own. Go out and get it now, and while you’re at it pick up a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 as well….. but make sure to beat THPS before even touching THPS2……

Overall
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A brilliant game. This isn’t a game for Skaters only either. If you’ve never even touched a skateboard you’ll still love Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. And if you love to skate you’ll love to play a game that finally does the extreme sport of Skateboarding justice. Amazing.

Overall
9.4/10 (Rounded to 9/10 for GameFAQs)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/19/01, Updated 08/19/01