Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2

My opinions on all things skateboarding in video games mark me out as some kind of unhinged lunatic - Tony Hawk's Underground and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 are the pinnacles of the franchise, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 was good actually, the Skate franchise is an unplayable abomination, that sort of thing - and I never even played the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, had never even heard "Superman" until now....and even I can see what an exhilarating nostalgia rush this is. Turns out I know my way around School II better than any school I actually went to, and have literally every pixel of Venice Beach seared into my brain forever. The new engine plays like an absolute dream, both offering a sharp, snappy fluidity to the THPS1 levels I wasn't already familiar with and being similar enough to the originals to allow my muscle memory to kick in and run out the exact same lines I always have in THPS2. They've also included reverts, wallplants, levelling out, double-tap flips, and a whole range of other tricks that weren't introduced into the series until later iterations, which opens up all sorts of new possibilities on some of these levels and brings the gameplay - at least the core, skating part of it - in line with my favourite Tony Hawk's games. The vast majority of the songs from the original soundtracks have been licensed again as well, many of which I haven't listened to since then and made me smile as soon as I recognised them. Who knew there'd ever be a situation where I was happy to hear Papa Roach?

There's a possible longevity problem with it, which would make me wary of suggesting that anybody should pay full price for it; the game has over 700 in-built challenges to complete if you want to truly 100% the game, but many of them are very repetitive (performing the same actions as each individual skater in turn), or involve online multiplayer (which I don't pay for on Xbox, essentially locking me out of a whole bunch of the achievements), or involve heavy use of the Create-a-Park feature (as much as I enjoy playing around with that, and found it to be a big improvement on previous iterations in the series, it certainly isn't for everybody). Knocking out all of these challenges start to feel like a bit of a chore after a while. The park creation feature seems like the real key to keeping this game interesting in the long term - adding extra functionality here, allowing people to add challenges and gaps to their created parks, should foster a healthy ecosystem, making playing other people's parks more fun and incentivising more players to create their own. Having more levels will, in turn, make unlocking all the challenges feel less repetitive. (I also suspect that they will make the THPS3 levels available as DLC, for what it's worth; there was such a significant shift in level design and gameplay focus in 4 that it makes more sense to hold that back for a different game entirely, along with the THUG levels, rather than awkwardly combine it with 3.) That aside, I don't know what anybody could realistically have wanted from this game that it doesn't deliver.