Xbox - Tony Hawk 3 review

| GAME FEATURES |	Developer : Neversoft
A.) The best Skate boarding game out there. And it's not just skating. It has a lot of competition that friends can play against	Publisher :Activision
B.) Play as all the "Pro Skaters"	Released sometime in 2002
C.) Better then Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3
D.) There are over 100 mini games to play in this game. Some easy, some hard.	Type : Extreme Sports / X-Games on the Street

This game is the first time I tried a Tony Hawk game since Neversoft put the legendary Tony Hawk Pro Skater on the Sega Dreamcast. I would like to say that Tony Hawk Pro Skater for the Dreamcast was a decent port, but I can't say that now because so much people on the Internet say that they hate the Dreamcast (never would own one even if it was dirt cheap like it is now) Does the new one rock? So far yes in a strange kind of extreme way. I'm not an extreme person. But I know of not so extreme people who played Tony Hawk who liked it. Why else would it be the standard in extreme sports of this generation. Everyone with a half a brain likes Tony Hawk Pro Skater? Every Tony Hawk game sold a million copies since the Playstation debut in 1999, sold even more copies when it went multiplatform. The game is more popular on Playstation then any other console may I might add. I don't ask people how much . It would be impossible for people to describe it without setting down and playing it together. I don't get many visitors so I can't really explain this very well. Fans of the series would have a easier time with this one. They know exactly what they like about in Tony Hawk the game. . The bikes ride the rail forever and the game is so easy that you couldn't even trade it for a cool Tony Hawk game without paying 15 dollars extra. I never even thought I like it until I played it. Neversoft now specializes in extreme sport games. They release a new Tony Hawk game like clock work (every year now since 1999) Since then they've put all games on competitive platforms. If you seen the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater on the 100 Greatest Videogames of all time polls, I promise you that that is just because the control scheme is better then most sport titles on the Playstation 2. When I normally think of the 100 best tiles of videogame history I think of Final Fantasy III and Super Mario Bros or Metal Gear Solid.

What I am most interested in is how this game got the Teen Rating? For those who aren't familiar with this game and think "its another one of those dumb mediocre skating title like those BMX titles on Playstation. But then it wouldn't be so legendary, know would it. Know I understand those people who recently picked up a console of this generation and were in the dark since Super Nintendo and just happened to pick on of the best videogames avalible today out of curiousity. Although with the Internet and word of mouth for 5 years that would rarely happen. That happened with me. I got I first videogame in 1997, and it wasn't a Playstation. If I didn't buy a Gamecube or waited so long to get an xbox, I probably would have a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game for N64

This game is good because it is big. You can talk to skaters, listen to the latest rap music, do tricks, find items, out play your friends and play any song that will download to your xbox hard drive. Did I mention that the game is out for the PC? Who plays THPS with a mouse and keyboard? Some games aren't meant to be played on the computer. Why? The console versions are so much cleaner and playable. That about sums it up right there. Did I mention that Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 is a little better then Tony Hawk Pro Skater for Dreamcast. After a while their comes a time where a game can only be very good once. Anything better then the original, anyone else would give it a 10.0 because that game was a mere molopoly and no one could tell that the ultimate conquer was it's own successor. It's true. Look at Metal Gear Solid or Legend of Zelda and how the sequels improved apond the prequels while not taking away from other aspects of the game which made it great to begin with. I'm not a skater, okay. I'm a race car driver. But I bought it anyway because I got it cheap. I was wondering why some reviewers gave this game a 9.0 out of 10, 10 out of 10. I got the good stuff out of Tony Hawk Pro Skater. But it is still extreme skating. You know .... skate ... do tricks ... fail ... draw blood. Repeat this process again and again until you feel light headed. Well the 3D animation is really good, doing the same objectives over and over give me a headache. Be sure to check back in 2 weeks for my Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 review. (article posted Aug 01, 2003 7:00 PM | revised once)

Summing up Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4
Graphics	10.0	Looks like Pyro on a skateboard in the game Halo! You know when Komani put Snake in a skateboard level in Metal Gear Solid 2 for Xbox / PS2. The only reason that I give this game a perfect score in the graphics department is that I've seen the Playstation 2 screenshots online. Some reason the PS2 version doesn't look washed out in the character models I mean you might have smooth animations, but you don't have a lot of bump mapping and hex shading. In Xbox, the game has all three. How many times can you have a perfect shadow when doing anything. I don't know how a small developer like Nullsoft can push out this much pixel animations on the buildings, shadows on all the ramps, cars, rails and buildings.
Control	9.0	The character control is very smoothed out. An example of average control is loose and flimsy while still retaining the stabilization to be able to do tricks. The 100 tricks aren't possible with out some foundation of turing, jumping doing mid air combos. It has to work and it does and has worked since the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater. If it aint' broken why fix it then. The tracks are huge and are filled with a lot of trick zones. While the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater I and II were in doors, THPS 3 and 4 are out doors. One thing they should include in Tony Hawk Pro Skater, which they didn't is the original tracks from the previous games. Like the original had skating arenas from Minneapolis to Miami based on real locations. Neversoft didn't upgrade. They should know that people will always buy the latest Tony Hawk over the last installment. Why don't they just have the same levels and add more levels? They don't and there are plenty of levels to skate around in. Things have sure come a long way since Skate or Die on the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Orginalism	8.5	The game is America's favorite extreme sport which airs on ESPN twice a year called the X Games. This show needs no introduction. Anyways, this game has a introduction. A carrier mode, free skate mode, multiplayer mode are all cool. Instead of having one player do narrly tricks, you have two! The next Tony Hawk Pro Skater should have unlockable Nintendo characters on Skateboards. Not multiplatform though. Perhaps since Neversoft did make a Spiderman game they could put Peter Parker on a Skateboard. I think they already have. I'm not sure which number of the Tony Hawk franchise had it. The point is it would be funny to see Mario, Yoshi or Captian Falcon on a skateboard do mid air tricks. Microsoft needs a mascot. I wouldn't want Billionaire Bill Gates himself skate boarding in my game. That would be cruel and unusual. Though I wouldn't mind having some anime girls skating in the next Tony Hawk game as long as they were cute. Xbox has had so much reconizion with Tecmo's Dead or Alive III and Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball.
Sound Effects	10.0	The music including rap is some popular songs that come with extreme sports. This game feels like a rap game. This game is a very good example of pop culture we have in America! The next Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Tony Hawk Pro Skater Underground is going to be much bigger, have a lot of skater speciality shops and be very street based.
Replayibly	8.5	Good. While the replay is almost obvious. How many games have a combo of great replay and pretty good game play mechanics. You can visually look at the game when these guys are doing tricks and memorize the tricks and go out and see the real thing and know what some of the tricks are. They could might as well be perfect because I'm not a extreme skater fan. All I know is the control sceme feels pretty good here in this game. This game has every staker trick known to man, unless Tony Hawk himself creates a new trick. You can decover it from the very beginning. It's good. But I'm mostly into racing and first person shooters. Although some of the good first person shooters and racing titles for xbox are a little slim.