Despite the famed success of the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series, the latest edition, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, fails to impress. The Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game series was launched in 1999 for PlayStation. Quickly becoming the most popular game in the genre, Tony Hawk Pro Skater dominated the series and earned millions of dollars for Tony Hawk. Because of the success, Activision, the game's developer, has since released 10 follow-up games for numerous game systems, including PCs and Macs.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater's gameplay includes arcade-like challenges where the player can skate around a realistic environment collecting hidden items and earn a high score in an effort to unlock more levels and challenges. The series' latest edition, Proving Ground, doesn't fall far from the original game structure. In this newest edition, the skater can cruise the streets of Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and even Baltimore, including downtown and the Inner Harbor (sorry, no Charles Village). The levels show great resemblance to their respective cities and use the processing power of the Xbox 360 to create extremely realistic environments. The game is also available for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.
Besides the new levels that bring the gameplay close to home, new updated features of the game are split up into three categories: Career, Rigger and Hardcore. Each of these three categories of gameplay has its own highlights. In the Career category, you can learn the "Nail It" moves that enable the player to maneuver their skater's feet in order to create their own tricks. Playing the Rigger trail allows the player to unlock the abilities to add new objects in the environment to skate on with the "Rig-A-Kit." For example, say you want to jump over a car to obtain a certain item hovering above it. You can enter the "Rig-A-Kit," place a ramp in front of the car and obtain the item with ease. The "Rig-A-Kit" also enables the player to break into locked environments. Lastly, playing the Hardcore trail allows the skater to learn new moves to make him go faster and literally "skate-check" pedestrians in order to get them out of your way. For example, once learning the "Aggro Kick," the player can push much harder and obtain fast speeds in order to clear immense gaps and objects.
Besides its levels and gameplay, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground features a large soundtrack with a wide variety of artists including Blackalicious, !!!, Foo Fighters, Slick Rick, The Clash and the Rolling Stones, just to name a few. The game also features a number of unlockable items, just as its predecessors, such as skaters and environments. The player is also able to film or photograph their own moves and edit them with an in-game video editor.
Although Tony Hawk's Proving Ground offers a wide array of features, it still does not fall far from its predecessors except for its enhanced graphics and enlarged skating environment. For the past eight years, no game was comparable to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. But with the release of game developer Electronic Arts's fall 2007 release, Skate, the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series seems to be losing the competition. EA's Skate could undoubtedly be called a simulator because of its unbelievably realistic gameplay. Whereas in Proving Ground, the player can simply hold down a button to accelerate and eventually move as fast as cars, the player in Skate must push to obtain speed and only can reach a realistic level unless using a ramp or going downhill. Although Proving Ground features the "Nail-It" mode, which enables the user to control the skater's feet, EA Skate's entire gameplay is based on a similar idea. Using the analog stick controls to pop the board and move the skater's feet on it, making every trick attempt different in someway. In Tony Hawk's series, each trick will always look exactly the same unless entering "Nail-It" mode. In EA's Skate, the player basically has the ability to style each individual trick that he wishes to perform. One persistent issue with the Tony Hawk's game series is the unrealistic abilities of the skater. In Proving Ground and its predecessors, we see the skater flying over buildings and grinding objects for miles, enabling the player to cover an entire city in one combination move, without ever touching all four wheels on the ground. Each game character becomes Superman on his board. While this can be fun and entertaining, the concept gets old and makes the game less challenging.
EA's Skate stands out as a more sophisticated game than Proving Ground, with features and gameplay that make the enjoyment of the game lasting. While Tony Hawk's Proving Ground is not a poorly developed game, but its overbearing similarity to its predecessors makes the game lack originality.
