Current Events > Do you know what one of the greatest tragedies of gaming history was?

(+) Yeah! (+)

When the Tony Hawk series stopped having games released each year, and regular games.

That was probably the biggest tragedy of all. Well, that and the 32X. Seriously. The Tony Hawk games were excellent, and you could put 100+ hours into those monsters. So much fun. Very good graphics, and the areas were really well thought it. Up until 2007, everything was fine, but then Neversoft decided to "shake things up", and we got those extremely expensive, boring looking motion board games, and not even every year. Wtf. Why. I know the series was (apparently) tailing off quite a lot with sales, but, ironically, the change to the different games just about killed it. I remember, when Ride came out, it sold something like 3,000 copies its first week. 3,000. Lulz. I don't know what Neversoft and Activision were thinking.

I think the series peaked with Project 8. SUCH a great game. I expect I have 150+ hours on it. Over the years, I've often gone back and started new files, and I also have my "main" files, which I've done a lot of the game on. Still haven't even come close to 100%ing it. Project 8, and the other sandboxy games were such great templates. Why didn't they just keep going like that?

Thoughts on all of this? In general, why do companies have an excellent series going, annual installments going, and then just call it a day?

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Sunhawk posted...

I think the series peaked with Project 8. SUCH a great game.

The series peaked with THUG. After that the devs started running out of ideas and the series eventually lost steam when it was forced to compete with EA when SKATE came out. If you really want my opinion on THUG, check out this youtube review I did of the game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gogjpOLm4io&t=176s

I got sick of Activision's shit when American Wasteland for PS2 was completely broken and impossible to %100 due to glitches and bugs. Project 8 looked really good but it wasn't a good game and Proving Ground for the Wii was incredibly clunky with motion controls shoe-horned in. Each new game started becoming more disappointing than the last. That's what killed the franchise and made SKATE seem so fresh at the time.

Though I liked Downhill Jam, it felt like a cash-in and deviated too far from the franchise to even be considered a true Tony Hawk Game.
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the series lived and died with the real skateboarding hype / wave of the time.

When that fad died out, so did the games.
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THPS3 > THUG2 > THPS4 > THPS2 > THUG > THAW > THPS1

Only played like an hour of P8 and PG and they both played like crap imo

I miss the Tony Hawk series so much though >_> It's a shame it's dead now. How come some indie studio isn't filling in the void with some "not-Tony Hawk game" like other devs have been doing?

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THAW was the decline for me. Random crashes, NPCS would occasionally not talk to you for missions until you reset the console, impossible to 100% the stat challenges due to glitches, literally piss-easy 10k score challenges even on Hard Mode, LITERALLY copy/pasted create-a-park from THUG2 and just changed 1 single background, the terrible levels they chose for classic mode. You could tell the annual release schedule that Activation was whipping on Neversoft was getting to them. It was still a fun game, but the series definitely was getting fatigued.

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Thug 2 had too much Bam Margera/Jackass type of bullshit. American Wasteland is the first bad game in the series. Never recovered.

Thug 1 was the peak of the series
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FuneralFroth posted...

Thug 2 had too much Bam Margera/Jackass type of bullshit.

Yeah, but all the create-a-modes you could do, the massive amount of levels, the story-mode gameplay-wise was really fun, and classic mode was a treat to see again. It had the most content of any Tony Hawk game to date I think.

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True true
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When Gunpei Yokoi died
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When American hero Justin Wong got parried by Japanese warmonger Daigo and ate a super to lose EVO moment 37 and the home crowd started cheering for the foreigner and challenger, it was like a reverse Rocky 4 moment.

You guys know about THUGPro, right? It's a mod of thr PC version of THUG2 that lets you play every single level from Thps3-Thug2 in one game. Plus a couple levels from 1, 2, and THAW

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AlecSkorpio posted...

When Gunpei Yokoi died

I was truly shaken when Satoru Iwata died. He was the backbone to Nintendo and even took pay cuts so that he could pay developers a living wage.
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Wii_Shaker posted...

AlecSkorpio posted...

When Gunpei Yokoi died

I was truly shaken when Satoru Iwata died. He was the backbone to Nintendo and even took pay cuts so that he could pay developers a living wage.

I understand Gunpei died at a time when nobody in the west would care but if you look at what he did for Nintendo and gaming as a whole it is a real tragedy
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AlecSkorpio posted...

When Gunpei Yokoi died

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