Sony
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground
By Matthew Williamson
Nov 19, 2007, 7 :07 am

Perennial Tony Hawk developer Neversoft began their career by making games that were either obscure or never got off the ground. They also created an awful game that abused Bruce Willis’ voice titled Apocalypse, which didn’t do much for their reputation either. In 1998 that all changed as they released the title that would skyrocket them to a near-household name: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (THPS). A huge success both critically and commercially, THPS started and kinged the skateboarding genre on home consoles. Neversoft was then either forced to or decided to milk the series, as seems to be the norm for the sports genre, and released a new game (or two) ever year.

Nine years after the first release in the series and we have Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground. From the start, THPS was much more an arcade-style game, evolving over time into an open sandbox, skate anywhere, score ridiculous amounts of points, and wreak general havoc everywhere style. In Proving Ground the player starts out creating a skater to represent themselves and uses them to move through the ranks of the east coast skating circles. While the initial amount of customization a character can be built with is fairly limited, additional clothing, board, and tattoo options open up as progress is made.

Once a character is built, they are dropped into the streets of Philadelphia as an above average street skater. The character finds their friends wondering about town and uses their help to prove themselves by making it big in three areas of skill: rigger, hardcore, and career. Each skill set follows multiple story strings where the player will frequently run into well-known and respected professional skaters. This first meeting is accompanied with a real video of the skater showing their skills. Unfortunately, being a professional skater doesn’t involve having any skill as a professional actor: most of the lines they deliver range from stiff to completely ludicrous.

During the skill missions you’ll be focusing on the core mechanics that are important to being the best skater around. In rigging you’ll be working on building ramps, jumps, and pipes for competitions and for taking pictures. With hardcore the player will focus on the street—and taking it back—learning skills like Skate Checking so that you can knock out the gangsters occupying public skating areas. Finally, career will take you through tournaments and competitions, which usually involve inflating your e-ego through stunt and trick photography for magazines and videos.

The different skill missions are essentially long tutorials that draw out the unlocking process of the game. When moving through the stories for the different skills new parts of the cities - Baltimore, and Washington D.C. – will unlock. Strangely enough these cities are small and interconnected, actually feeling like a single large city rather than several separate ones. And to make matters worse, you can actually unlock, and be required to go to, parts of the city without any way to get to them.

While unlocking different aspects of the game - skills and locations - is a fairly well integrated addition to the series, I can’t help but find most of the rest of the aspects poorly executed. My largest complaint is that, currently, it’s far too complicated for its own good. For example: if I am instructed to perform a manual trick (a manual is a form of riding only on two wheels of your skateboard) for a photo I must press and hold X; then release it to olie jump, while clicking on both thumbsticks in mid jump; balance the skaters feet with the sticks so that they perform a manual; then when in the proper position click the right thumbstick to take the picture; then press the X button again to ollie and land the trick to complete the task. Now, for as complicated as this action is, you’d think you have a fair amount of time to perform it, right? Wrong. All those actions must be executed in the span of a couple seconds, and this doesn’t even include tasks like angling the camera for the best shot, making sure you’re lined up for the trick, and adding in more complicated trick executions for receiving “Pro” or “Sick” accomplishment levels.

Due to the steep level of knowledge required the game ends up almost entirely being a tutorial. Up until the very end of each skill track Proving Ground will constantly be teaching a player new skills, or advanced techniques for them. It is a very grating process that allows for little of the creative freedom that the THPS series used to embrace wholeheartedly. And since there are so many skills that are required, the instructions for what exact trick is requested to be completed is frequently unclear.

For example, the game may ask you to “nail” a grab trick. There are two completely different ways to do this: one is just your standard grab (pressing square and a direction while in air) and the NAIL-THE-GRAB way (which, outside of being a trademarked word, is unnecessarily complicated). Now, this seems like it would be a simple matter of trial and error, but it’s not. This task is usually attached a score that you have to beat, and one way is frequently more difficult to score high at than the other. After fifteen minutes of jumping over the same gap and finally figuring out a run that will net me the amount of points, I was often rewarded with a message stating that I still needed to “Nail” the grab trick because I had performed it in the wrong manner.

Unfortunately, controls and clarity aren’t my only qualms with the game. Proving Ground also looks terrible and hits on a few of my video-related pet peeves. For the PS3 at least, the game only runs in 720p, but you could have fooled me with the - very - poor character models and jagged edges. As previously mentioned, there are actual videos from many of the professional skaters we’re introduced to throughout the story, but the quality of these is approximately that of the average YouTube clip. The professional videos lead me into my pet peeve of video problems: aspect ratio. This game has so many instances of incorrect aspect ratio that whoever approved the final product should be ashamed of themselves. The skate videos are all filmed in a 4:3 ratio (standard television) stretched into 16:9 (widescreen television). Also, the text will frequently switch from being tall and skinny, to short and fat, and then back to normal from one menu to the next, all of which is the result of attempting to compensate for aspect ratios.

Overall: 6/10

Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground is still fundamentally part of the THPS, but this time around the apple has fallen just a bit too far from the tree. With a steep learning curve that never seems to have a summit, and skill sets that are just far too complex and extraneous, it seems to be built only for those returning to the series. Top off the difficulty with poor graphics and presentation and you have a game that’s not going to appeal to most people. THPS really needs to take a year off and reassess where it’s going, if it doesn’t, then games like Skate are going to absorb all of its demographic.