Tony Hawk's Project 8

Can you make it into Tony's MySpace Top Friends?

Everyone who is a fan of the Tony Hawk skater games knows how the series took such a nosedive in its later years that it is frankly a miracle that there's an actual quality remake of the first two games, THPS2 of course making it onto this 1001 list because it's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.

While everyone is playing that 2020 remake, I'm sitting here with Tony Hawk's Project 8, the eighth title of the series (bit of luck, that). I never played it back in 2006. I'd moved on. Skateboarding games just weren't doing anything for me any more.

Did I miss out on something worth my time? According to the 1001 list, yes, yes I did. But what did I actually miss out on?

Fun Times

Of the many versions that straddle the generations, I've got the PlayStation 2 port of Project 8. I'm going to miss out on the open-world nature of next-generation versions, as well as a rebuilt game engine, but the gameplay is essentially identical between versions - skate around pulling off tricks with the face buttons and the D-pad to meet objectives from high scores to situational short stories.

It's been a while since I've played a Tony Hawk title, so I hop into the training to refresh myself. It's awkward to use this fat mushy D-pad on the Xbox controller, but these games are built around the simplicity of holding circle and a direction, or whatever.

There are, however, some differences from what I remember of these games. Manuals used to be, well, manually entered into with presses of the up and down buttons, but now you can just start one with a press of the square button. Changing grinds doesn't require an ollie now as well. I don't remember being able to do that in any other game, but it's been a long, long time since I tried to play a more recent Tony Hawk title.

Satisfied that I've got the gist of it, it's time to see what the story is this time around.

So the Hawk wants to find the best skaters in the land to form a super skate team to show off to the public. There doesn't seem to be anything more to it than that. Impress Tony Hawk. That's the game. How do we go about doing that?

On the older generations, Project 8 is structured into areas, like the levels of old, each with a big ol' list of challenges for you to accomplish to increase your street cred, stats, and standing against other skateboard hopefuls.

Each challenge has an amateur target, a better professional target, and an often seemingly ridiculous sick target, for the die-hard Tony Hawk players to grind away at, no pun intended. Me? I'm just here for some cheap thrills - because I sure as hell don't have the skills.

You're free to roam the area looking out for and starting the challenges you like the look of at your own preference. A photography challenge sounds easy enough. Jump between some trees and pull a trick. Simple.

When you do something impressive, you'll be notified of your increasing rank compared to all the other skaters vying for Tony's attention. We also get sent a video on our sweet Nokia something or other, but all it tells us is how the compass works. What a waste of my WAP bandwidth. You can tell I never had a smartphone for a while, huh?

Frustrations

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater was always an arcade title before it was a simulator. No matter how many new moves are added, new mechanics introduced, motion capture driven animations... no matter what you put in to attempt to make a Tony Hawk game more realistic, they will always be goofy games that disregard physics.

Sometimes, that's all you want. You don't want skateboarding video games to require complex mathematics to play, you want them to make you feel like a ridiculously good skateboarder. Whether that's just landing a trick that you could never do in life, or landing a twenty trick combo around a suburban neighbourhood, it doesn't matter. You want to feel great doing whatever it is that you're doing.

I don't feel great doing anything in Project 8. One challenge has me grind over a swimming pool hood 6 times so that it opens. I can tell you now that even though that's as simple as skating into it and pushing triangle, it was way more than six passes before I could open this thing.

I either jumped over it, or didn't grind enough of it, or turned too much so that I grinded (ground?) over one that I'd already done. It made me look like a bumbling idiot on a skateboard, and it certainly felt that way too. It's not that anything was a slog to control, it's more that by this point in the Tony Hawk series, you'd have thought that the controls and the feel of the gameplay were perfected, but I don't get that feeling.

Take this objective, for example. It's a run of however many obstacles around the map. Do X here, jump over this, do Y on that. It's a way to see how a level flows from section to section, how combos could be linked together to take you all over the map.

It's also a great way to see how poor you are in Project 8, how bad your spatial awareness is, how slow your reaction times are. You should be able to do this with few problems. It might take a couple of attempts, but you should be able to manage.

Not me. Lord, no. I just wasn't having fun trying to do this. From missing objectives to things not counting towards an objective, to bumping into everything on the way to the next like a pinball... I didn't stick around this objective too long, by which I mean I quit it and moved on.

Kinda wish I didn't if this is the next objective I stumbled into. The Tony Hawk's series has always had its share of crude humour, especially when the Jackass crew started to work their way into the games, but I was genuinely lead to believe that with a clean game like Project 8 (just look at the box art to see what I mean), we were past all this silliness. 'Shag Dad's balls'.

We're collecting giant golf balls which gives us another reason to explore the level, but when you're on a time limit you don't really have time to admire the view. This PS2 port is going to be a visual downgrade from the next generation releases, of course, but it's not a bad looking game.

At this point, I'm reminded that looks are one thing, sounds are another, but I literally couldn't tell you what I was listening to for the hour I was playing this game. Not that it was unrecognizable - I'm sure the tracklist has some classics on it - but that it didn't affect me in the way that THPS2 did (or more accurately, THPS did). 

So it feels like an old game, but more awkward to control. It doesn't look bad, and I can't remember the music. It's got silly objectives that appeal to the 13-year-old skaters that play this game. Why is this a must-play title for anybody?

It seems like the 1001 write up suggests that Project 8 is about as good as the Tony Hawk's formula can get. Not only does it offer an open(ish) world full of familiar skate challenges, it also nods to those early instalments and challenges you to complete yet more challenges within that all too iconic two-minute timer.

I failed, of course. I blame the controls. Aiming for these snowmen seemed simple, but as soon as I hit the grass I'd be put off-target and have to skate all around the block for another approach. Can't really do that when there are only five seconds left on the clock.

By this point, though, I'd been sent a video message about how to escape the suburbs. Some bloke in an animal outfit with a remote control car thinks we can break through the gate and open up an entirely new area to explore in the process. This is my ticket out of here. My chance to see what other surroundings Project 8 can put you in.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong here - just skitch and jump, you pillock - but I do know I'm not sticking around to find out.

Final Word

And that was all I could stomach of Project 8. I've little to no intention of going back for another attempt, either, and for a game that is supposedly the pinnacle of Pro Skater, that can't be good, can it?

I've got to be a little careful here because less than a year after Project 8 was released, Skate hit the scene. Well, dropkicked Tony Hawk in the face out of a window. Skate was a phenomenon. It was a kick in the teeth, and then a kick in the balls, to the Tony Hawk series. After eight games of D-pad tricks, a competitor appeared to make full use of the analogue controls for the tricks instead, and skateboarding video games were changed overnight.

The Tony Hawk series would then go on to release an actual skateboard controller with motion control in a failed attempt to reclaim the crown and very much went downhill from there. Project 8, therefore, has very strong claims to be the last great Tony Hawk title, but thanks to the games that came before it, it's the forgotten title.

Many people, myself included, checked out of the series before this came out, and this wasn't enough to bring them back in. And then Skate hit, and history tells of the rest.

There could well be a fantastic game in here, but it somehow feels more dated and cumbersome to play than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 does. I imagine that's because I expect THPS2 to be a little janky, and assume later games just do it all better, but Project 8 just didn't feel right to me. It felt like that old system was being pushed to the breaking point.

Maybe I'm rusty or should have played the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions instead. That's valid, but even on a new engine, they play to the same old mechanics. Are these challenges and minimal plots and juvenile jokes enough to put up with the actual skateboarding? Or are those skateboarding controls just that solid, even after all these years?

I can't agree. Project 8 was probably great for a good few players. Back in the day, it was probably even better. In 2020, it just doesn't hold up for me. Guess I'll have to look into that THPS1+2 remake everyone's going on about. Maybe you should too.

Fun Facts

A notable feature I never came across was 'Nailing a Trick', where everything goes into super slow motion, the camera zooms into your feet, and you can flip the board around whatever axis you want to your heart's content, creating tricks on the fly. It sounds more impressive than it looks.

Tony Hawk's Project 8, developed by Neversoft, first released in 2006.

Version played: PlayStation 2, 2006, via emulation.