Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (N64)
Developed by: Neversoft
Published by: Acclaim

I played the Playstation version of this game a while ago, and I was thorougly impressed. I’m not a skater, and I didn’t think that this game would be appealing to me. Besides, it certainly couldn’t be any better than Skate or Die, right? Well I was wrong. This game is loads of fun, and well worth your hard earned cash.

I had been lead to believe that the N64 version of this game was terrible, and suffered from poor controls. That’s not true at all.The controls are almost identical, using the 4 yellow buttons on the N64 controller in place of the X, circle, square and triangle buttons on the Playstation controller. The graphics are amazing, and the gameplay is just as easy. The learning curve is fairly small for this game, but once you’ve learned the basics there is still a lot of room for improvement. The game rewards creativity and experimentation by giving more points for combos and secret moves.

The camera in this game was programmed perfectly, following behind your skater at just the right distance, and reacting at the right speed. You very rarely get disoriented in the game, but you can’t help be blown away by the intense speed of the action that goes down.

There is so much to do in this game, and the multiplayer games are fun too, and this is why I say it is worth buying. Each of the skating areas contains so many different obstacles and hidden rooms that I don’t think you can ever grow tired of them. The game is really addictive too. You just keep saying to yourself “One more try and then I’ll go to bed” or something to that effect. At times I wished that the sessions were a little bit longer, or that you could increase the time length for the sessions, but the short 90 second sessions are one of the reasons for the addictiveness in the game.

The only thing missing in the N64 game is the blood, the skate videos, and some of the music. The soundtrack for this game is amazing, and any aggressive music fan will love it. This was yet another thing that endeared the game to me. How many games do you know that open up the title screen with the Dead Kennedys?? For the Nintendo version they had to shorten some of the songs, and leave some of the songs off the game completely. (The Vandals don’t appear in the Nintendo version for example.) Now I wonder whether this has to do with lyrical content for the songs, or whether it is because of space limitations. I imagine that both issues were a factor, as the Dead Kennedys, Primus and a few other songs appear without any singing at all in them.

Overall, this game is an amazing piece of work. Skaters are sure to love it, that is a given. But I’m willing to bet that most non-skaters will appreciate it too. — Sean