Tony Hawk's Proving Ground (PS3)

One grind forward...two grinds back.
1/31/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

On the plus side, as far as controls go, it was far easier for us to manual using the Sixaxis than the 360 controller. Things just seem tighter. Another advantage to PS3 gamers is the ability to use the movement of the Sixaxis to control your skater's balance. We found that it made a huge difference on grinding challenges.

One new feature that didn't entirely wow us was the Skate Check, which was part of the Hardcore path. Here you can slam to the ground anyone that gets in your way. It's visceral fun for a while, but gets old quickly. The build-your-own-stuff that constitutes the guts of the Rigger path we also found underwhelming. Hitting the select button tosses you into a clunky skate-park-designer-looking deal that lets you put kickers, half-pipes and whatnot anywhere you want. As you progress, you have access to cooler and cooler stuff, but we still found this path the least exciting and enjoyable.

When you're not following your career path, there are still a billion ways to keep your forward progression going. Borrowing from the deep history of the series, you can shoot for your Amateur, Pro and Sick scores in a timed run, spell S-K-A-T-E and C-O-M-B-O, and find the hidden disk. It's stuff you've been doing for years, and it's a good litmus test on how the thing compares development-wise to past releases. If you had no trouble banging out Sick scores in previous games, but could only muster Amateur scores here, it would be a telling fact. Early on, we were convinced either that development was out to kill us or that we had lost our skills when we had trouble scoring crazy numbers in a timed two-minute run. Eventually, we discovered a locale that let us get serious air and pull off some nasty transfers.

Another potential time suck is the video editor. Here, you can look at the clips of you that were recorded at the various video challenges sprinkled around and then edit them into a promo worthy of the X Games. The editor is surprisingly deep, letting you toss in effects and synch up music to your tricks. A minor complaint is that the music options don't include the tunes that play while you skate around the rest of the game. The only thing that would have made the editor even cooler would have been the option to do your video tricking to the sounds of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Foo Fighters, or the Stones.

We were really looking forward to the online game, mainly because Project 8 didn't have one. Unfortunately, it didn't impress me much. Frame rates were inconsistent and choppy. And don't think about firing up your 360 for any better results; the online game was no less choppy in that version.

So while there have been several new additions to things, this is still essentially the same Hawk we've been playing since the original PlayStation days. Sure, the technology has gotten better -- the skaters look more realistic, and the locales flow seamlessly into each other -- but at its core it's still about beating a lot of challenges to unlock new areas in which to beat challenges. One of the most telling signs of the series' lengthy teeth is that the one new mini-game -- Hawk-Man -- is merely a skate-centric version of Pac-Man. And when "innovation" is a riff on a character from 1980, you know you've hit a rut creativity-wise.