3. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 – PS2

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is one of the best examples of a developer using new and more powerful hardware to better every aspect of a game experience. Playing this installment in the now long-running series makes the first two look like beta versions for this, what I consider the first true entry in the series. That’s no knock against THPS and THPS2, but playing them now it becomes painfully evident how far ahead of their time the developers at Neversoft were thinking, and how the PS2 was a godsend to this type of game. Tony Hawk 3 is the apex of one of the most important series of all time. It delivers more hours of gameplay than even the longest of RPGs, excels equally in both single and multiplayer modes, and defined a new genre of sports games from its release through the present day.

I play a lot of video games, and as anyone who makes such a claim, I find the learning curve on most games to be rather low. When I play an RPG, first-person shooter, platformer, racing game, etc, I generally know what I’m getting into, beyond the few eccentricities every game has. With this game, I was quite awful at it upon first encounter; indeed, it took numerous hours of playing to slowly learn the rapid button pressing in tandem with brain power it takes to become skilled at the game. While this type of experience may seem maddening or frustrating to some, I found it to be refreshingly rewarding. Manipulating your skater in the game can grow to be very complex, true, when you begin to string multiple tricks together and explore each level, but mastery of this system is so fun that one finds themselves able to skate around for long periods making their own fun. There are goals within the game driving progression through a number of levels that bring creative and eventually dastardly challenges to be sure, but the real magic of the game comes with the discovery that simply moving around – ie, every moment of the game – is as fun as the best moments in other games.

This writeup started with the mention of how this third entry in the Tony Hawk series is the first true realization of the concept. Tony Hawk and 2 suffer from their older hardware – the levels were far smaller and the framerates were extremely choppy. The fact that these games were excellent in their time despite these technical issues goes to show how excellent a concept the Tony Hawk series overall is. But the games also lacked a fundamental design flaw. Gameplay is, more or less, driven by performing tricks. Tricks linked together lead to exponentially more points, and more satisfying combos. In the first two games, performing a trick on a half pipe instantly ended a combo (in fact, in the first game simply landing on the ground ended a combo, but the addition of the Manual in THPS2 fixed that). Tony Hawk 3 corrected this oversight by adding the Revert, the addition of which effectively created the potential for a combo of infinite length. Previously near-impossible combo scores of 1,000,000 points instantly became the low end of the impressive-score spectrum. Achievment in the game was limited now only to the imagination and skill of the player.

Sadly, in recent years this series has become somewhat a victim of its own success. Now in its ninth entry, the past few installments have began to tack on juvenile storylines, goofy and gimmicky gameplay mechanics, and uninteresting skating environments, causing players to have to wade through a lot of crap to find the fun core of the series buried far below this window dressing. In some ways after a game this good, it’s a damned either way situation – by staying the same people grow bored, by trying to change people complain it’s not how they remember the good old days. Present issues aside, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 remains one of the best video games ever made, better than any other entry in the series.