Grave Gamer News & Views — tony hawk

The Half-Pipe King Returns in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5

You can’t keep a good skater down. You can break every bone in their body, snap their board in two, and slap ‘em with a hospital bill bigger than an island nation’s GOP, but you just can’t keep them down.

The genre defining, physics defying classic is back in THPS5. Robomodo, the crew that brought us Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD, are rolling forward with the sequel on Activision’s dime.

The dev hopes to capture the series’ now classic over-the-top mechanics and spruce it up for the new age (kind of a trend with these revivals). Power-ups and projectiles (?) add to your skateboard/frail human arsenal. A bevy of new levels that play host to a bevier amount of missions can be tackled by your lonesome or online with friends. Progression accumulates online or off.

No date has been slapped on the deck but we know the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will launch first with last-gen versions arriving sometime after.

Time was, it seemed as if EA’s Skate franchise face-planted Tony’s arcade skater into the ground. Since that series has left a four-wheeled void in the skate-sim market, maybe THPS off-kilter brand of extremely extreme sports gaming has room to wiggle. Is Robomodo chasing a ghost, though? Shit, if the soundtrack is half as good as it was back in ‘99, who cares? I’ll grind a ghost.

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Only the people that played the old tony hawk games will understand this..

Bigger Tony Hawk Game Gaining Some Traction?

Thanks to those of you that just couldn’t say no to your inner nostalgia taking control of your wallet, Activision and developer Robomodo’s Tony Hawk Pro Skater HD is a (financial) success.  Having been downloaded a total of 120,000 times since its Xbox Live release, sales figures are convincing Acti that it might not be such a horrendous idea to drop a full fledged Tony Hawk game on the masses once more.

According to Robomodo’s head honcho Josh Tsui, Tony Hawk HD served as a kind of test run to see how welcoming the public would be towards a new sequel, and that development on such a title is “just a matter of when and how."  Before then, Robomodo plans on supporting the download with DLC featuring levels from Pro Skater 3 and the return of the revert – aka the fuel that stokes the combo-stringing fire – and plan to eventually release the game on PSN and PC.

It’s important to remember that despite Tony Hawk HD’s monetary reception, critics have gauged their reaction to the game between being bored by the lack of content to outright tearing it a new asshole (reviews were "quite vicious,” says Tsui).  “Remaining true to a franchise’s roots” and “copy and pasting a thirteen-year-old formula” are two things Robomodo couldn’t tell the difference between, consequently making the remake a very thin package where old school thrills give way to boredom quicker than I can ollie a bum.

Perhaps Activision should consider tossing the franchise back to the original Pro Skater purveyors, Neversoft.  They’re currently tethered to the Call of Duty series, poised to support Black Ops II with a lineup of DLC in order to free up Treyarch’s time.  Although, I can sympathize with Neversoft if Activision has successfully flogged any desire to work on another skating game out of them after the sheer amount of Tony Hawk’s they’ve created (having bred nine separate entries into the series…it might be safe to assume they’ve lost their taste for Tony Hawk, what with being slaves to the property and all).

Tony Hawk Shows Chris Cole Video Games for the First Time with Pro Skater HD

What happens when a franchise takes a nose dive after peddling bullshitty peripherals and tired gameplay? It goes back to square one and rehashes the breadwinners in the series, of course. But I’d be an indignant liar if I said I wasn’t excited to return to the levels and gameplay that kicked off my score addiction that...

Long before Skate came along and killed the prospects of pulling off moves like “Jesus Air” in a video game, Tony Hawk ruled the world.

A return to Pro Skater’s basics is the only way this series is going to tug the nostalgia strings of anyone that remembers bailing out of a near one million combo and breaking their fucking controller.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HDdoes the HD remake right by forgoing...