It's kind of hard for me to overstate how big a part of my childhood and very-early teenage years the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series was. I would play basically every game released, 100%'d 2, 3 and Underground 2 more times than I can count, and so much of my early music taste came from this series too. No doubt I'm one of countless people who in their childhood excitedly started trying to learn to skateboard after too-much-time playing these games only to be quickly rushed to hospital due to breaking a bone (my poor arm).
Playing THPS 1+2 was understandably an intense nostalgia-trip. Even just beyond being really cool to impressionable-young-me, the two games that were remade here were such a wonderful mixture of sports game, arcade game, and 3d platformer, blending genres in a way that was legitimately exciting at the time and would spawn a wave of imitators in the following few years. THPS 1+2 is extremely faithful to these originals in terms of feel and intent, whilst updating it in ways that are nearly unanimously positive; adding in the best portions of the move-sets from later games so that you can flow around levels much more naturally, and reworking the visual design of the game to compliment the much-improved graphics.
Sadly these games have lost something through the years, and whilst this game is certainly an improvement over the originals (it's hard for me to imagine returning to the first Tony Hawk's game's extremely limited move-set) there are certainly moments when it feels like all these updates somehow make some of the wrinkles more noticeable; some of the fetch-quest items just blend into their surroundings for how detailed everything surrounding them is. Maybe trying to hunt down five "don't skate" signs hidden throughout a level on a 2 minute timer only to be forced to find them all again when you can't for the life of you figure out where the fifth one is just fundamentally hits a bit different over two decades later. Being asked to locate five homeless people and jump over them in a specific order definitely hits different (seriously, how not punk can you possibly get??). Time is not always kind.
So the experience was certainly largely fun, and great to return to after all these years, but also very much flawed, bearing the weight of time on its shoulders. It took me about four hours to 100% the first and second game content after which I struggled to find much more to do. I could play through the game again with a different character, something that appealed to me greatly when I was a kid, but there's so much else I can do with my time nowadays that it's hard to sell me on what largely amounts to running back the same experience all over again. I put a few hours into the speedrun mode and it was fine, but trying to find scripted routes through levels really detracts from the free-flowing, expressive nature of the movement for me. The game seems to have an expectation that you'll put a lot of time into it considering its levelling and challenge systems, but I think I'm largely done with the game for now; content with my experience, grateful to have had this opportunity to revisit a freshened-up version of something that was once very important to me, but also very ready to move on to something a bit more substantial.
Playing THPS 1+2 was understandably an intense nostalgia-trip. Even just beyond being really cool to impressionable-young-me, the two games that were remade here were such a wonderful mixture of sports game, arcade game, and 3d platformer, blending genres in a way that was legitimately exciting at the time and would spawn a wave of imitators in the following few years. THPS 1+2 is extremely faithful to these originals in terms of feel and intent, whilst updating it in ways that are nearly unanimously positive; adding in the best portions of the move-sets from later games so that you can flow around levels much more naturally, and reworking the visual design of the game to compliment the much-improved graphics.
Sadly these games have lost something through the years, and whilst this game is certainly an improvement over the originals (it's hard for me to imagine returning to the first Tony Hawk's game's extremely limited move-set) there are certainly moments when it feels like all these updates somehow make some of the wrinkles more noticeable; some of the fetch-quest items just blend into their surroundings for how detailed everything surrounding them is. Maybe trying to hunt down five "don't skate" signs hidden throughout a level on a 2 minute timer only to be forced to find them all again when you can't for the life of you figure out where the fifth one is just fundamentally hits a bit different over two decades later. Being asked to locate five homeless people and jump over them in a specific order definitely hits different (seriously, how not punk can you possibly get??). Time is not always kind.
So the experience was certainly largely fun, and great to return to after all these years, but also very much flawed, bearing the weight of time on its shoulders. It took me about four hours to 100% the first and second game content after which I struggled to find much more to do. I could play through the game again with a different character, something that appealed to me greatly when I was a kid, but there's so much else I can do with my time nowadays that it's hard to sell me on what largely amounts to running back the same experience all over again. I put a few hours into the speedrun mode and it was fine, but trying to find scripted routes through levels really detracts from the free-flowing, expressive nature of the movement for me. The game seems to have an expectation that you'll put a lot of time into it considering its levelling and challenge systems, but I think I'm largely done with the game for now; content with my experience, grateful to have had this opportunity to revisit a freshened-up version of something that was once very important to me, but also very ready to move on to something a bit more substantial.