Oof

After years of wanting one, I finally purchased my N-Gage last week. I wanted to start playing a game that I was familiar with to get used to the system’s controls. I am a diehard fan of the Tony Hawk series so I, like probably many others, played Tony Hawk as the first game on my new system. What I got was not what I expected. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the N-Gage is chock full of bugs and should be avoided at all costs.


The Lame Gameplay
At least once a year Activision comes out with a new Tony Hawk game. Last year we got Project 8 and earlier we got American Wasteland. Each game in the series introduces something new that makes the previous game feel obsolete. Now when it’s hard to go back and play Tony Hawk Underground 2, it’s definitely a challenge going back to play the original Tony Hawk game. None of the manuals, the manual tricks, tweaked tricks, reverts, etc. are here in this one which make it feel like a completely different game void of the skill that the new games have. The later games have fixed pretty much everything that could have been done better with the first one. Now let me say, I have recently gone back and played the original on the Playstation and while it felt outdated, I still had a lot of fun with it.

In Tony Hawk you have to do various challenges for each level on your skateboard. If you have only played the newer Tony Hawk games and not the older, expect a much less diverse array of challenges, as each level has variations of the same missions over and over throughout the whole game. You have two minutes to complete as many challenges as you can; any challenges that you finish you are done with for the whole game. Other than the score competitions, you have five challenges per level. Each level has two high score challenges, a hidden tape and the letters S-K-A-T-E that you have to find, and lastly you have the challenges where you have to skate on five things in certain ways (such as grind five park benches, hit five valves, etc.) The tricks are much less complex in this game than in later ones. You have your ollie button, the button to do flip tricks, the button to do grabs, and the button to do grinds. The only way to string combos together is to grind on different things, and since the controls and camera angles are so horrid, it’s very hard to do that. The game’s grind button seems very unresponsive and only seems to work half of the time. Some people will like the simplicity of the tricks and some people, like diehard fans of the series, won’t like it so much at all.

Now believe me, if Activision managed to bring the original Tony Hawk game to a portable system in a perfect port with great controls, I would give this game at least 4 stars. Activision has done EVERYTHING wrong in this port, making it the worst Tony Hawk game in existence. Let me break down the major problems:


The Bad Frame Rate: I usually am the one bashing on people for picking on games with poor frame rates. Remember Quake III on the 360? Everyone said that game was bad because of the frame rate. I played that sucker so much and never once complained of the frame rate once. When you’re playing a game like Tony Hawk where every move you make needs to be timed perfectly, you need to have a good frame rate. There he is folks, Tony Hawk, going 40 miles an hour about to hit a giant ramp and… what is this? Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Hawk has just slowed down time and is moving in slow motion! What is he going to do next?


The Awful Camera Angles:
If you were a master at the first Tony Hawk, you will probably land half of your tricks. If you’re not the greatest at Tony Hawk, you may land one in every five to ten. Just when you get on that rail or hit get air in the half pipe the game goes a little too Wayne’s World on you:

EXTREME CLOSE UP!!!!

You never have a grasp on where the heck you are going to land so you can either play it safe and not do any spins or you can test your luck. The camera angle bounces all over the place. When you finally can tell what’s going on, the terrible controls ruin your moment of peace.


The Horrendous Controls:
Button placement is very similar to the Playstation version of the game, but that doesn’t make the game easy to control. The bad frame rate and camera angles don’t help the game’s controls at all, but there are three more things that make the controls unbearable. First off we have the fact that the buttons are extremely close together making it so you often press the wrong button. Next up, take into consideration that you have to press the buttons fairly hard on the N-Gage; this plays a huge part because you need to be able to press buttons at rapid pace in the Tony Hawk games. Now the third thing is that not only is there a bad frame rate and the buttons take awhile pressed, but there is a noticeable lag in button response. While it may not be a huge lag, you can definitely notice that your guy doesn’t ollie when right after you press the button. Come on, this is supposed to be a fun and simple skateboarding game, why do I have to execute my tricks a second before I’m even at the jump?

So how about those learning curves, eh? Yeah, this game doesn’t have much one. I played this for hours and barely got any better. All the problems of the game just make it too hard to play. Hand me this game on the Playstation and I’ll get through the first level in under the two minutes. Hand me this game on the N-gage and I have to complete each challenge slowly and separately. I even had a hard time getting past the first level. The fact that the levels are so hard to complete does add some lasting time to this horrid game, yet the game still is short and can be beat in 4 hours or so. Wanting to beat it would be like if you were in a torture session and your torturer said he would stop if you wanted him to and you asked him to keep going.

This game is so bad that it would probably be more fun to get Nigerian scammed than to play this for ten hours. The Casino Royale torture scene would probably be equal to eleven hours.

As for multiplayer, the game does have multiplayer modes such as trick-attack, horse, and graffiti but with such horrible gameplay, you aren’t going to want to play this with a friend. Avoid this game.


Sound
The sound could have been pretty good in the game but is messed up by the horrible sounding output through the speakers. The game features a decent soundtrack with many licensed punk and rock and roll songs that you heard in the original. There’s no in-game track listing but I’ve heard many of the songs before. I don’t know a ton about music but I did identify one of the bands as Primus. The music sounds so poor through the speakers that you can hardly tell a drum from a guitar. Listening to this game with headphones would probably sound awesome, but I haven’t tried that out because I haven’t invested in the N-Gage headphones. As for the skate sounds of the grinding and the ollies, it all sounds good and oddly enough comes out much more clear than the music.


Graphics
The graphics are done right. The game looks almost identical to the first one. The 3D textures look a little grainy, and sometimes it’s hard to see what’s going on, but most of the time you can figure it out. The levels are large and the textures are clear and smooth for the most part. You can even see some well done facial textures. There are, however, several occasions where it is obvious that textures were made worse to be able to fit on the N-gage. There are even some occasions where they ended up taking out complete objects out of the game just to make it work. On the Downhill Jam level, there is a section where the sky was taken out; so for a chunk of the level, the sky is completely black. All in all, the game looks pretty good, especially for a launch game, and it sure beats the graphical crud out of some of the other games that came out later. Good graphics don’t mean a thing when the frame rate is so poor though.


Should You Buy this Game?
NO! There aren't really any redeeming qualities about it. There are a lot better games for the N-Gage, so if you buy this you probably won’t ever play it.


Graphics – 7.5
Audio – 6
Controls - 1
Fun – 3
Value – 3

Overall: 3.6