so here i am, having another phase where i wanna start skateboarding but due to the many reasons not to (bad weather, equipment is expensive, no good parks nearby, local kids will be mean to me) i have to resort to pretending i'm a birdman instead. even though skateboarding looks easy and i bet i could do all of this stuff for real if i tried

think the earliest tonygame i played was THPS4 which was apparently pretty different from the previous ones, so i was surprised how stressful and timelimitful the career mode in this one is. if you gave me only two minutes in real life i don't know if i would even have enough time to get on the board properly. pretty sure my first entire run in the warehouse, outside of slowly gliding around looking for collectibles i attempted one, maybe two tricks. attempted

alright you've beaten it out of me, i will admit it. i am not a pro skater, and i am definitely not Tony Hawk's. videoboarding feels...heavier than i remember. that or i have not played one of these in 15 years. as a kid i played 4, Underground 1 & 2, American Wasteland and Downhill Jam, and the disney one which upon looking at footage of it i see is straight up THPS4. i kinda like the heaviness here though, it's the same reason i prefer Mario 64 over newer marios, i like feeling as though i am piloting a whole entire man instead of simply choosing where he goes

i definitely started off just mashing buttons and seeing what funny words appeared at the bottom of the screen. i don't wanna study any charts or control sheets, i just wanna slowly build a vocabulary of tricks and ocasionally go "whoaa-WHOOAAA" when something big happens that i haven't seen before. no manuals here. by which i mean the trick "manual", all i know is i am sorely missing them and it makes it considerably harder to string combos

winging it served me relatively well for the first few levels but now the poorly-formatted gamefaq has been broken out. didn't realize until i was almost done with the game that collecting tapes increases stats...i'd been trying to 100% each stage before moving onto the next. can't tell if the max stats really make that much of a difference or i've just gotten better. so far the combo i'm most proficient at is the Pause-Down-Retry

that's it i'm becoming an old man who thinks skateboarding is Rude. i struggled with the tournaments man!! after the last one they showed me a skaters eating dirt video compilation which i thought was them owning me for being bad but apparently not, strange but cool reward for completing the game. i did not collect every tape because the numbers it wants me to get are too big of numbers. but it's apparently easier with the other characters who aren't Tony Hawk for some reason, so i will have a go at that because the game is fun and i want to keep playing it even though there are a half-dozen more installments that are all better

finished getting every tape with Tony after all, then went and did it again with another character who didn't have max stats. i'm gettin back in da groove.. learning to harness the Grind, and there's no balance meter in this one which i kinda like, i'm basically always scared i'm about to fall over which is how i'd be skating for real. a lil worried to move onto a game that has manuals too because i like the smaller, more isolated combos, and the pressure to have one going 99% of the time via some manner of manualage might make it not as fun

i just want to place gold in the final competition before i put this game down but i can't do it and my wingthumbs hurt from trying for so long aaah!!! i am well and truly taunted by this game telling me i cannot achieve certified proskaterhood unless i do it. i be watching videos i be looking at guides and let me tell you how annoying it is to try to find them for this game instead of the remake. i amend "ps1" to my search and they're like "yeah, yeah Pro Skater 1 i know"

alright. consider this game skated, professionally. there are twelve characters and completion is separate for all of them, so i am leaving it at 100 Percent Tony. i don't know who any of the others are anyway because they did not have video game franchises named after them. that's tony's skateworld!! what a video game. spent around 12 hours with it. it unfortunately did not sate my boarder's desire and i would still like to, as the game instructs me, "get off my [desk chair i don't own a couch] and go skate"

but one thing i wanna try out first..

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (Game Boy Color). i've read that the portable versions of these are their own neat little games. then i learned, not the first one though. the other ones are apparently neat but not. not this one. there's a very simple half-pipe mode that there is no reason to play more than once, if that. then the rest of the game has this top-down view

this is how it conveys that you have performed a trick on your skating board. i gotta say i have never seen a game with score rubberbanding. in order to finally place first in the tournament mode i had to look up specifically how well i'd be allowed to play before it started seemingly handing out 100-point bonuses to the opponents. i will say the grinding feels alright

THEN there's a 1v1 race mode which i absolutely cannot figure out. i choose the fastest character (one "tony hawk"), immediately boost to my top speed, remain at top speed, then my opponent, who has one fifth the speed stat, constantly doing tricks (usually slows me down) and crashing (also slows me down), just speeds ahead and wins somehow. but whatever that's this version of the game. music's pretty good, or it would be if they'd at least had the decency to throw in an 8-bit rendition of Superman