Wha Happun - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

[Deleted]

It's really kind of more about the franchise as a whole since 5's problems really don't exist in a vacuum.

Honestly my only actual exposure to the series is having played the demo on one of those old Pizza Hut PS1 demo discs, but I played that demo a lot.

[Captain Stud Muffin (BLM)]

So disappointed in how this franchise fell down the drain




Bring back underground 

[A Platypus Rave]

From what I remember 5 was basically oh shit we are losing the licence let's put out whatever we can which is why it was like 10% finished on disk.

[FinalGwen]

At the very basic level, a THPS5 was a good idea. A back to basics approach that just takes what worked from the old series without the gimmicks, and updates it with modern graphics and a few new features based on what current technology can do.

But Activision's nonsense and rushing it out, and not having a good team equipped for it led to this disaster.

[Spider2024]

180 degree Napster grabs!

[Cyno]

It's really sad what happened to this franchise after THUG. THUG2, AW, and Project 8 were ok, but the quality was definitely down compared to THPS1-THUG1. And then it fell off a cliff after that.

[Mozenrath]

2 and 3 were the ones out of the franchise I got the most out of, but it's also about where I stopped, since I'd pretty much sated my hunger for it.

[Kyn]

I *loved* the first Tony Hawk PlayStation game. Still do. I was a little 'eh' on the later releases, until one Valentines Day my boyfriend 'gave me' the latest game, then immediately spent THE ENTIRE EVENING playing it by himself. He took the whole 'buying things for other people that you really want yourself' to a whole other level.

I ditched the franchise before I ditched the boyfriend, unfortunately.

[Zone Was Wrong]

Really digging into this guys videos lately. Really informative stuff. Never realized there that many Tony Hawk spin offs, Holy crap.

[Cyno]

Good video and once again a sad lesson about Activision's running series into the ground with yearly versions with both THPS and Guitar Hero.

I almost feel bad for Robomodo, but I don't think they've ever made a decent game in their entire existence, even in previous incarnations. Didn't help that a lot of them came from the studio that made the horrendous Def Jam: Icon.

[SHAKEMASTER TV9 is Don Knotts]

Yeah, I was introduced to Tony Hawk through the PS1 Pizza Hut demo. I wanted to get the full game, but sometimes all you need is that one warehouse and Goldfinger's Superman song.

The franchise probably peaked with THPS 2 with 3 being a respectable followup. Going the update every year like its like the other sports franchises is what killed it. I remember EA also putting out Skate against Tony Hawk Proving Ground and winning the sales on the current generations was a bad sign.

[Hurbster]

Great video, he has really come into his own since the split. Now seeing Def Jam Icon makes we want to see a Wha Happen on that.

[Mozenrath]

Sept 14, 2019 20:05:25 GMT -5 Zone Was Wrong said:

Really digging into this guys videos lately. Really informative stuff. Never realized there that many Tony Hawk spin offs, Holy crap.

Yeah, Matt's great. I love that he puts more effort into dissecting these than just focusing on the bad, especially since he's specified he's more interested in troubled productions rather than just bad games, since he's done LA Noir for example. I feel like there's much more of an interesting story in that than something that is bad, but was always just obviously going to be bad.

[Deleted]

I actually played quite a few Tony Hawk games on the PS2 and Xbox about 4 or 5 years ago when I had too much free time, so I know about the decline, as well as the directive to go from "just about the skating and the music scene" to "let's rev it up with the insane shit, brah!", starting with THUG, which was the very first game I bought in the series (on the GBA). The GBA version wasn't ideally the way to start, of course, but you had to work with what you could, but at least it tried to tell a rather straightforward story of you rising the ranks as opposed to the off-the-rails insanity of the console version where you're bailing out your good-for-nothing friend, only for him to get an ego and start screwing you over at every opportunity, and ends with you doing tricks to show him you were always the better one as he throws Molotov cocktails at your ass. Then THUG 2 came along and was like, "Hey, Bam Margera's got his own show now! Let's incorporate his merry band of jackasses (pun intended, since a lot of the Jackass crew were in the game) and have you go around the world and cause mayhem!"

I honestly get why they wanted to branch out, considering that you couldn't just rely on the standard formula forever. But, the law of diminishing returns inevitably comes around and rebooting the series two games after doing an entry where a bunch of people are stealing various artifacts around Los Angeles to build a skate park wasn't going to magically solve the downturn. If anything, it would likely hasten it given people's reactions to the "reboot" notion.

As for this entry... it was doomed from the start; developer way out of their league, trying to reach impossible standards in a genre that was dead and buried, and now you can no longer ever play the game even if you bought a physical copy (assuming you don't mind playing the tutorial only). Frankly, the Bird Man has faceplanted for good since I don't see a revival in the series, considering that if you want to create a skateboarding game, you could likely have a better opportunity licensing a general deal with the X-Games and ESPN.

[Deleted]

Sept 14, 2019 21:01:06 GMT -5 Mozenrath said:

Sept 14, 2019 20:05:25 GMT -5 Zone Was Wrong said:

Really digging into this guys videos lately. Really informative stuff. Never realized there that many Tony Hawk spin offs, Holy crap.

Yeah, Matt's great. I love that he puts more effort into dissecting these than just focusing on the bad, especially since he's specified he's more interested in troubled productions rather than just bad games, since he's done LA Noir for example. I feel like there's much more of an interesting story in that than something that is bad, but was always just obviously going to be bad.

I'd really like to see him do Star Fox Zero at some point. Quality of it's debatable, but by all accounts the production was very troubled and down to the wire, and it's pretty inarguable that the game was a total flop compared to the huge Christmas hit it was supposed to be.

... Actually speaking of Star Fox-related flops, could be interesting to see one for Starlink, though I dunno if that has much of a production backstory to it beyond, "Star Fox isn't a draw and it's the only thing this toys-to-life game made well after the trend had died had going for it."

[Mozenrath]

Sept 15, 2019 1:16:36 GMT -5 Lizuka #BLM said:

Sept 14, 2019 21:01:06 GMT -5 Mozenrath said:

Yeah, Matt's great. I love that he puts more effort into dissecting these than just focusing on the bad, especially since he's specified he's more interested in troubled productions rather than just bad games, since he's done LA Noir for example. I feel like there's much more of an interesting story in that than something that is bad, but was always just obviously going to be bad.

I'd really like to see him do Star Fox Zero at some point. Quality of it's debatable, but by all accounts the production was very troubled and down to the wire, and it's pretty inarguable that the game was a total flop compared to the huge Christmas hit it was supposed to be.

... Actually speaking of Star Fox-related flops, could be interesting to see one for Starlink, though I dunno if that has much of a production backstory to it beyond, "Star Fox isn't a draw and it's the only thing this toys-to-life game made well after the trend had died had going for it."

Star Fox Zero seems possible. I know Mass Effect Andromeda is one he plans to do, since that obviously had major problems getting made, the studio was closed, got no DLC, and that, on launch, it was real rough. Like, it got patches and all, but it pretty obviously had a majorly troubled lifespan.

[Ultimo Gallos]

Only played THPS 1 thru 3. THen whatever one got ported to the DS. Great games. But I do hate that they put an edited version of Police Truck on the first game. IIRC that was one of the many issues that caused the rest of the DK's to split with Jello.

[Evilution E5150]

THUG games were the end for me, it became a jackass video game and not a THPS game

[ERON]

The Tony Hawk and SSX games were the last new games I really got into. After the Tony Hawk series fell off, I gave up on new games and became exclusively a retro-gamer.

As much as I loved the Tony Hawk games, they suffered greatly from the "We have to get a new game out every year" syndrome. Each new game in the series after 2 left me thinking, "That was good, but imagine how much better it would have been if they had spent a few more months working out the bugs and polishing it."

The create-a-skater mode was what really sold the series for me. I spent as much time creating skaters as I did playing the actual game. The series lost when Project 8 gutted create-a-skater, giving you only 3 basic templates to pick from.

It's too bad the whole extreme sports genre in games essentially died with the Tony Hawk series. I look at the open world games people play now and think, "Man, I wish I could skate around in that world."

[Deleted]

Sept 14, 2019 20:57:27 GMT -5 Hurbster said:

Great video, he has really come into his own since the split. Now seeing Def Jam Icon makes we want to see a Wha Happen on that.

I’m digging the playthrough of Duke Nukem Forver he just started. Rather informative