I Miss Tony Hawk Games

I miss Tony Hawk

I can remember the first time I played the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater game on the Playstation 1. It was incredibly addictive for me back then. I still remember spending a crazy amount of time searching for video tapes and other things that had nothing to do with skating at all. Over the past few years, the series has been hitting new levels of low, finalizing at the all time low of Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5. Having recently gone back and played some of the older games, I have realized that I miss Tony Hawk games.

I will be honest, I have yet to play Pro Skater 5 and I likely never will. The game looks like pure garbage that was spat out long before it was complete. The word lazy springs to mind when it comes to this game. We all know the game contains a ludicrous amount of bugs and glitches that somehow got past the QA tester. I’m not here to bash on all of this. The game is missing one of the most important features of a Tony Hawk game, split screen!

Back when the game took the devastating turn and ditched the standard gamepad in place of a fake rubber skateboard, the game lost its way. I can understand if split screen was removed from these games. It sounds like a fast way to punch someone in the face having to play this side by side on the fake boards. What I don’t get is why they didn’t include it with Pro Skater 5.

Split screen has pretty much vanished over the past few years. With games getting so complex, there are not enough resources on the system to handle multiple players at the one time. I still like to play Project 8 in split screen mode at times. While it is fun, it was not the best entry in the series. I had really hoped for Pro Skater 5 to fix all the mistakes of the past and give us a modern day version of the original PS1 games. It sucks that the series has not only vanished, but ended on such a pathetic low. For a franchise that started out on top of the world to ending up in the bottom of the bargain basket, it’s hard to understand how it all went so wrong.

I could sit here all day and talk about all of the cool memories from the Underground spin off games and how fun it is to go back and play the PS1 games. The fact remains that we have not seen a good game in years. The franchise was killed with that stupid rubber board and then abandoned by Activision or whoever owns the IP. The series should be given one last try. Either a kickstarter fund to test out the market interest or even a HD remake of one of the PS2 games. Pro Skater HD, really didn’t count, it was missing split screen (cardinal sin)! Half assed attempts to bring the series back to life isn’t going to work.

It doesn’t look like we will be getting a new entry to the franchise any time soon. We would be lucky to ever get one again at this stage. Maybe some time in the future, the IP will get picked up by some developer who cares enough to do it right. For now all we can do is wish and hope that we eventually get a return to the Tony Hawks series.

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