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Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Hopes

May 14, 2020 by Belghast

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 releasing September 4, 2020

With the announcement of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 I have high hopes but also some significant concerns due to the recent track record of the series. Yesterday I had a project piece to write, but this morning I cannot get it out of my head. The details so far are that Vicarious Visions is working on the game and it is targeting the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC via the Epic Games Store. It also is coming out fairly soon, with the trailer announcing that it releases on September 4th, which apparently a demo of the Warehouse level coming out before that for anyone who pre-orders the game.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Collector’s Edition Contents

There are as far as I can tell three main products available, the standard game is roughly $40 regardless of platform. The digital deluxe edition is roughly $50 and adds some retro stuff for create a skater mode, retro costumes for Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen and Steve Caballero, and The Powell-Peralta Ripper visualized as a skater. All of those things really only matter to those of us who are 40 somethings and grew up in the era when Powell-Peralta and the Bones Brigade were kings. Finally you have the physical collectors edition that is roughly $100 and comes with the game, digital deluxe goodies and a legit Birdhouse Skateboard Deck. This is intriguing because in theory the game is $50 and based on my research Birdhouse decks seem to sell for around $60 so you are seemingly getting your moneys worth with the edition. As much as I loathe physical editions of games, it is a temptation just to have it so I can hang the deck on my wall.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Warehouse Level

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a big series for me, and I owned the original on PlayStation, the first sequel on Dreamcast and when the third game came out for PlayStation 2 it was among one of the first titles I purchased. You have to understand I was a little skater punk during my pre-teen years and I even went to see the Bones Brigade when they did an exposition at the fair grounds. I was a horrible skater, but I loved everything about the scene and even patterned a lot of my early musical tastes based on what I was hearing in the background of skate videos. The soundtrack to Streets of Fire is still freaking amazing even though everything else about it is 110% cringe these days.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Schoolyard Level

I grew up playing games like Skate or Die, 720 and T&C Surf Designs which were generally horrible representations of skateboarding as a whole but the best we had access to. So when I got my hands on the first Tony Hawk game I was completely enthralled. I spent countless hours in Free Skate mode just doing random tricks and figuring out lines to take in the timed modes. The Dreamcast version of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 however elevated everything to a new level, because the graphics at least for the time were completely amazing. I got caught up in create a skater mode as I leveled up and maxed out all of the traits, allowing me to do some silly stuff with the game. The second game even had a create a skate park mode, allowing you to craft levels from a bunch of prefab components. It reminded me of my early years building entire fingerboard skate parks with cardboard and index cards, using bic pen barrels as coping.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Dam Level

I really want the remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 to be amazing. I loved the original games, but I also have to take a moment to express my doubts. Not all of the games have been great, and Activision doesn’t exactly have a great track record with the franchise. In 2012 the released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD which was in theory a remix of the best levels from the first and second game, but fell short on a lot of the mechanic aspects of the game. Everything felt very floaty and the moves seemed to lack the weight that the original console games by Neversoft had. In 2015 they released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 which seemed to take these floaty mechanics and double down on them with moves that felt more like you were ice skating on concrete than actually riding on top of grippy urethane wheels. To make matters worse the game attempted to dip its toes into the games as a service model and required you to connect to lobby servers in order to play.

I hope they do in fact recapture the glory of what made the first few games in the series amazing, and give us a legitimate clean game without the entanglement of always on play and microtransactions. There is already a video that analyzes the game play we have seen so far, and the Youtuber offers concerns that the animations thus far appear to be more akin to what we were seeing in HD than in the first or second game. Ultimately at the end of the day it will come down to how it plays, and we won’t know that until September. I have a lot of hopes though, because I really want this game to be good. The Skateboarding genre evolved after THPS into more simulation games like the Skate series and the indie darling Skater XL. These are absolutely not my jam, because in truth all I really want is the arcade fun that the Tony Hawk series gave me. So here is hoping we can get a return to form for that series.

Master of Orion Impressions

March 4, 2016 by Belghast

Indulging a Whim

Due to some strange glitch in my blog… I am apparently writing this blog post for the second time this morning. Unfortunately I am probably not going to be able to go into nearly as much depth as I did previously… because I am running out of time. Last night I indulged a whim and gave the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion a spin. For years Master of Orion and Master of Orion II were those go to games when I wanted to spend an afternoon clicking the “next turn” button. They sit firmly in the 4X genre, so when I want to Xplore, Xpand, Xploit or Xterminate… they serve as a great way to destroy an entire day. I am not joking about that aspect because there are absolutely moments in the past where I have started playing Master of Orion II at around 1 pm… and then realized suddenly that it was apparently 1 am and I should really go to bed. I love this franchise… but previously I had to put an asterisk at the end of that statement. Master of Orion 3 was one of those games that I was looking forward to in 2003 more than pretty much anything else. The problem being when I finally got my hands on it… it was largely indistinguishable as a Master of Orion game. The aspects that existed… were buried beneath a horrible interface that made the game play itself a chore.

So imagine my glee last night when I booted up the Wargaming.net reboot and found that pretty much every single aspect of the game was instantly familiar to me. Those things that had changed were leaps of simple logic and not necessarily problems for me to figure out. Traditionally when I play Master of Orion I have always played the Silicoids, a race of rock creatures that have the interesting trait of being able to colonize quite literally any planet that is not a gas giant. This always allowed me to get an early lead on the total number of star systems… which would ultimately give me a lead in the ability to crank stuff out of my industrial complex. While I see the Silicoids on the website, they are apparently not yet available in game. So instead I went with the bugbear-like Bulrathi which started me with a significant military advantage… one which I tried to keep the entire game by denying the other races the technological increases they kept asking to buy from me.

Familiar Patterns

When I play one of these games I tend to play it in the same pattern, and it absolutely worked here once again. I am an early expansionist, devoting most of my resources to generating colony ships and a skeletal fleet to protect them and defend planets. While not as useful as the Silicoids, the Bulrathi do have the ability to colonize heavy gravity worlds… which allowed me to snap up a bunch of planets that the other races could not. From there I focused on improving each of the planets and cranking out as many tech advances as I could. There were many points in the game where the other races were one to three weapon grades behind me, which meant when the tables turned… and I shifted into my other game mode… it was a blood bath. Generally speaking when I play a 4X game I play extremely peacefully. I stick to my own worlds and build up my engine… and then whichever race makes the mistake of picking on one of my worlds… I flip everything from producing infrastructure to producing war machines. Last night it was the Psilons that had the poor decision making skills to pick a fight with me, at which point I sent a fleet of Carriers… which ended up being my high powered Capital Ships to destroy them. As soon as I could churn out new troop transports I was moving the fleet on to the next planet and conquering it.

Towards the end of my march across their star systems, the Humans got in on the act of bombing their planets from orbit. This is when I saw what might be the first significant glitch in the AI. I had no formal alliance with the humans, and they simply decided to start attacking the Psilons on their own as well. There was a period of time where I had to wait on a troop transport, and they easily could have landed their own and took over the world. The problem is… they never did… they just continued to bomb the populace from air. I am not sure if they simply lacked the technology to create troop transports… or if the AI was confused by having a contested planet. Ultimately I landed my own troops, took over the planet and the humans left orbit considering the planet was now being guarded by one of my cruisers. It was around this point when I realized that it was 11:30 pm and I really should be logging for the night. Once again I had frittered away an evening playing this game, and enjoyed every moment of it.

But Early Access

If you have ever loved Master of Orion in your past… then I highly suggest you check this game out. It does a great job of washing the bad taste of MOO3 out of my mouth, and making me forget it actually exists. I will go so far as to say that from this point on… the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion is probably replacing MOO2 as my go to game for scratching that 4X itch. It is an Early Access game, and I have no clue when it will be “finished”. The game already looks extremely polished and I am guessing that most of the remaining development time is adding additional races to the available list, and multiplayer balancing. I’ve only played single player at the moment, but I would absolutely try playing this multiplayer… but I just have to find a time when me and several friends have entire afternoons to blow away as we furiously click that “next turn” button. The only concerns I have is how Wargaming might try and monetize this later. I could see them selling races, or selling various bits for the game… but at this very moment it feels a very good single player gaming experience. Time will tell but for the time being I am happy I picked it up. As far as playing it on a regular basis… I will probably finish the game I started last night and see just how it ends up, and then neatly pack the game away until it launches. This seems to be my current method for playing those early release titles… test it out, kick the tires… and then leave it along until launch.

Of Chicken Horse

February 7, 2017January 31, 2016 by Belghast

More Friends

After crashing extremely early last night, I ended up getting up fairly early. From about 5 pm onwards I didn’t really get proper sleep, and mostly just laid there quietly until shortly after 6 pm. The result was me getting to PAX and parked at around 8 am. The parking situation was much improved, and that at least took one worry off of my mind. By the time I got through the random bag fondling that they have been doing upon entering this year… Dallian was milling around in the Coffee Shop area. So we sat there for a good while fiddling with street passes while waiting on others to show up. I am not sure why I have been obsessing about street passes, but that has really felt like my overarching goal. I guess part of it is the fact that I realize I will not have access to this many in one place… until I end up going to PAX next year. So I spent pretty much any free time clearing out one batch of streetpasses and playing the picture puzzle and find mii game. I am up to 392 Mii characters on my 3DS which is a significant boost to the 90 or so I had before coming this year. Before coming this year I had completed zero of the slides… and after this year I have seven fully unlocked.

While hanging out there and chatting… and waiting on the rest of the folks to show up we had a random encounter with a couple of awesome folks. The two of us were sitting at a table for four, and a couple came up and asked if we minded them joining us. When you play board games there is a convention of playing with the box lid standing up, to signal you are open to letting other people join your game. I wish there was something like that for tables, because I felt bad commandeering a table…. but I also wanted a nice place to sit while we waited. What followed was an awesome conversation about Destiny and the Division, and a bunch of other console and PC games rolled together. The funny thing is… we had this lengthy conversation all without introducing ourselves, and it took a fifth person joining the conversation to actually make that happen. Now I hope to actually keep tabs on Hatti and Rabbit over twitter, and maybe even interact more between now and next year.

Everyone Must Play

As the day went on we managed to catch up with Tick, Damai, Thalen, Paragon, Ashgar, Rae and her brother John… and eventually Rowan, Sctrz, and Genda and his wife. I believe when we were playing several rousing games of Code Names, we had ten around a table in the gaming area. I believe the game was chosen in part because it scaled nicely regardless of how many people happened to be playing it. While playing a rapidly snuck a few blurry pictures which I am totally using on my blog without talking to the individuals first. However of the several photos I have… I picked the one with the people in it that I didn’t think would actually care. I am also not naming anyone by name…. so hopefully no one gets cross with me. Today was a lot of trying to sort out what to do, after we played a half dozen rounds we ended up breaking up into smaller groups and never quite joining back together. I spent a lot of time circling like a shark trying to decide what to do… and alternately spending time with Exale and Maovis, who were cosplaying Venom Snake and Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China. Lo Pan was an insane hit, and we ended up spending a lot of time stopping so folks could take photos.

I think the highlight of the day was dragging people to the Ultimate Chicken Horse booth just like I had done to me. I cannot adequately elaborate on just how fun that game really is to play. It takes a few rounds to get into it… but before long folks are cheering at the screen or groaning when they fail to complete a level. There is something so deceptively simple about the game… and the iterative gameplay of each person adding a piece to the greater level keeps it fun and engaging. I think the best feature is the fact that there is a fixed number of attempts that everyone can make, and regardless of the outcome someone will be crowned a winner. I am already extremely partial to the chameleon who does this silly rainbow dance when you manage to win with him. I also do not mind at all the Raccoon, and my lanyard now sports a button since they apparently ran out of Chameleons. This is definitely going to be one of those games that I pick up immediately, and probably start buying for all of my friends so that they can join in the multiplayer madness. I forsee us talking about this game a lot on the coming AggroChat.

Parking Debacle

January 30, 2016 by Belghast

Pax Day One

The first day of pax was interesting, mostly because it started off on a bad foot. I wrote about yesterday how I failed to charge my cell phone over the course of the previous night. The positive of that however is that I learned my power bank does a phenomenal job of charging phones, and by the time it took me to drive from the hotel to the convention center it was sitting around 63% from the previous 15%. Last year there was a plethora of parking options up and down Commerce and Market streets, but unfortunately yesterday every single lot had a full sign. I finally ended up parking in a surface lot, having to pay $20 for 8 hours. On the way to the convention I stopped and chatted with one of the attendants at the garage I parked in last year, just to find out what time of the day it actually filled up. Turns out that some other corporate event is going on downtown, and that a company had booked pretty much all of the city run garages, greatly reducing the amount of available parking space. She said that today they would be open again, so here is hoping that I can get into the garage I am used to.

As far as the day itself, it took a little while to connect with everyone. I met up with Dallian in this coffee shop area near a giant Pax South sign, where we milled around until we joined up with Paragon and Damai… and eventually Ashgar. Since we had not heard anything from Thalen yet, we wandered into the con and around the floor. All the while I was on lookout for trying to sort out where exactly my first appointment was. Turns out it was downstairs at the river level…. which is not something I even knew existed. The rooms down there were super nice however, and in truth I liked them better than the area the Motiga suite was last year. When I went to scope the place out I got nabbed by Deanna from Perfect World, and ushered into their room to hang out while waiting on time for my appointment. They had this really great spread of brownies and other pastries, but unfortunately… I had just eaten a large breakfast at the hotel thinking it might be awhile before I found food on the con floor.

Livelock

Livelock_Screenshot_02-1024x576

I will of course be writing a proper piece for MMOGames.com once I have more stable internet, but I still wanted to talk a little bit about it this morning. I have to admit I was not really sure what to expect from all of the press announcements leading up to me actually getting to test it. I had a basic idea that it would be a top down shooter, but I was not really certain past that. I turns out that the game as a whole is a love letter to the twin stick shooters of the past, updated and infused with modern gameplay mechanics. So in my head it feels like Ikari Warriors meets Diablo meets some almost MMO mechanics. When the game is finished it will include three mechs that have specific niches, and in the discussion they mentioned tank/healer/dps holy trinity. It seems as you level up your character to 30 you unlock ways to swap up your abilities and make them more defensive or more damaging. I asked the ever important question about how big of a detriment a new player will be to seasoned players… and apparently the game is more skill based. Level 1 characters and Level 30 characters have the same health, and the upgrades to abilities don’t really crank up the damage value, but instead change the way they work. So in theory this might be a great game for impromptu co-op with friends. That has always been the challenge in our own little circle, that if someone was not there on the first night… it is often difficult to play catch up and be viable until everyone simply hits the level cap. The other nice thing about this game is that it is a straight up $19.99 game, and I grilled them a bit about future monetization plans. It seems like right now they have no plans to offer a whole bunch of DLC characters or anything like that… they are just trying to design a really tight three player co-op experience and that is in many ways refreshing.

Ultimate Chicken Horse

The other game I really want to talk about from yesterday is Ultimate Chicken Horse. Now this is a title we have talked about before on AggroChat on our PAX Prime Show. While Tam, Kodra, and Ashgar tried to explain the game to me… I didn’t really “grok” it until I was sitting there yesterday with a controller in hand playing it myself. The idea is pretty simple… you have a platformer that you compete with up to four other players. The level designs are pretty classic and relatively simple to complete. What makes the game amazing is that each round, each player gets a block that they can place somewhere in the level. Some of these blocks help the players out like springboards or platforms…. and others will kill the player like crossbows that fire arrows, or spiked floors. The goal of the game is the make the level difficult enough for at least one of the people you are playing with to die…. but not so hard that you cannot beat it yourself. If everyone beats the level… no points are awarded. If no one beats the level… no points are awarded. Things start to get really insane about five rounds in when the map becomes a field of death and destruction. I can already tell this is going to be one of those must own “go to” games for hanging out with friends. The best part about it is the fact that it does couch co-op and does it amazingly well. The only problem I am going to have is that I am not sure if it supports network co-op, and I simply don’t have a group of people to play it with on a regular basis in local mode. I am absolutely going to buy the game regardless because I want to support this flavor of insanity. If you get a chance, you should totally check it out when it ends up on steam shortly.

Ending the Day

The big problem with the day yesterday, was the fact that I was super paranoid the entire time about the crappy parking option I had. Previously the $10 lots were for as long as you cared to stay, meaning I could be there late at night without much issue. I talked to the parking attendant about the lot I happened to be in, and she mentioned that it was a privately owned lot and they were super quick to boot cars. So the entire time while roaming around Pax I kept looking at my phone to check when it was time to walk out and get the car and try and move it to someplace better. I finally headed out around 3:30 in the afternoon to do that, and in the time it took me to exit that surface lot… someone had already taken my space. I drove around Commerce and Market streets and all of those lots still showed the “Full” sign, so I circled back around to the lot I had parked in… which now had a barricade across its entrance as well. So everyone went off to Dave and Busters, and I instead went to the Hotel and played 3DS until my wife and friend got in a few minutes later. Once the traffic had died down we went out roaming for a bit, because we needed some pop to throw in the hotel fridge. The day took a lot more out of me than I realized, and I ended up crashing really hard about 9 pm. Over the course of the day I walked a little over 15,000 steps, which is something I am just not used to right now. It was fine and well while I was in motion, but once I got back to the hotel room… it took its toll. Overall was a really good first day, other than the parking bullshit. Next year I am going to sort out the bus system and just use it, because in theory there is a bus that picks up right outside this hotel and drops off near the convention center.