We all know that peripherals are fun, don’t we? Just think of all those fun times you’ve had standing playing Shaun White Snowboarding whilst stood on your Wii Balance Board, or hammering the drums during a Rock Band session. Hell, even simpler and cheaper things such as Sega’s The House of The Dead “Hand Cannon” (a piece of plastic that does nothing more than make the Wii remote look and feel more like a gun) can genuinely improve the way a game feels. Activision – who are currently unashamedly bending the Guitar Hero series and its fans over and doing strange things to both of them from behind – have noticed that everyone loves peripherals. So much so, that to revive their once-superb Tony Hawk franchise, they’re asking you for £100 so that you can stand on a bit of plastic and act a little bit like you’re on a skateboard.
I know what you’re thinking. EA already did this with Skate-It for the Wii, didn’t they? Yep. That pretty much failed to do what it promised, too – albeit not as badly.
Calling the skateboard peripheral a “bit of plastic” is a bit harsh, I grant you. The controller is a sturdy piece of kit that benefits from solid construction, a properly grippy top – although with my board, that material that makes for that grippiness started to show a few pockmarks after only five minutes of play – and four peripheral sensors (one on each “side”) in order to read things such as your attempts at grabs and pushes. Oh, and it takes four AA batteries, is wireless, and contains a mini version of the standard 360 controller’s buttons and d-pad for menu navigation, as well as a much larger “Start” button which is designed to be activated with your feet.
It’s fair to say that for your £100, you do get a bit of kit that is well designed, and which both looks and sounds pretty good.
Unfortunately, when it comes to peripherals, a good 99.5% or so of your sense of value for money comes from being able to use the purchased peripheral for its actual purpose. For this reason, after about ten minutes of trying in vain to use the Tony Hawk: RIDE controller, you’ll feel as if you’ve wasted £99.50 on a rather complicated doorstop and the pretty box it comes in.
It isn’t that the idea is bad, as that’s far from the case. Standing on the board, sliding your foot along the floor to the side to push off (as you would do on a real skateboard) and tilting and swivelling the board to pull off tricks and steer around obstacles doesn’t sound like a bad plan. The problem is that the controller is so unbelievably slow to respond (when it decides that it actually wants to respond at all, that is) that you’ll be tearing your hair out within minutes. This is proved right from the start, when you’re being taught how to use the board. The first challenge tasks you with successfully completing ollies to collect tokens whilst the game controls your steering – and this works. Then, you’re told to ollie, and then tilt the board in either direction with your back foot, in order to pull off a trifecta of flip tricks.
After four or five attempts at this, doing exactly what I was told to by the tutorial video and watching as the game would ollie, but wouldn’t bother recognising my tricks, I finally got lucky and was thrown into the next challenge. Here, you have to do the same thing, only you ollie and then pivot the board with your back foot in order to pull off a different kind of trick. After twenty minutes of trying to get the game to recognise that I was doing exactly what it had asked me to (again), I gave up.
Deciding that the calibration may be an issue, I took a short break to calm down, before coming back and recalibrating the board – which did the sum total of nothing to improve the experience. I tried a different type of floor surface, and even exchanged my board for another at a local game emporium, to be sure that I didn’t have a piece of broken kit. Nothing helped.
In the game proper, being able to pull off tricks as and when you want to is a pretty important thing. When you’re asked to pull off a 5-0 Grind and manage to do everything but, you’ll blame yourself for not knowing how to do it. Then, you’ll blame the developers as you realise that there’s no documentation on how to do each individual trick anywhere in the game or manual. Then, when you’ve visited GameFAQs and got the instructions down, you’ll blame the game as it completely ignores your inputs. Super. This means that even if the board worked perfectly, I’d have a damned annoying and punctuated time in trying to complete the game that seems to be trying to keep secrets from the player. “I know how to do this trick, and I want you to do it. You want to know HOW, you say? Well…ha, haaa, haaaaa…that’s for ME to know, and for YOU to find out!”
That, of course, is if I could be bothered to work my way through a game that is graphically and technically poor, that it could feasibly have been released ten years ago. Random characters wander the ugly and uninteresting streets for no reason other than to draw your attention away from the fact that you’ve just missed ANOTHER ollie, or that the “technical wizardry” (the game’s claim, not mine) that the board contains has decided that even though your hand is fully over one of the side sensors, you didn’t actually want to pull off a grab trick. The manual suggests that you don’t need to cover the sensor, rather hold your hand about 2 feet away from it in order to get the best results When you do that, you look ridiculous and it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference anyway.
On top of that, despite the fact that there’s a whacking great “Start” button on the side of the controller, the game doesn’t allow you to actually use it. So, before you play, you need to press the start button on a separate controller, and also do that every time you hit a high score and want to proceed past the view of the high score table. Game design fail.
The problem is that the game SOUNDS like fun, and ultimately is for about twenty minutes or so. This is enough time to get “on-the-fence” buyers to lay down their money after someone demos the product in a store or they have a quick go on somebody else’s copy. They’ll assume that the reason that the game isn’t doing what they tell it is because of their lack of skill and that practice is required. Put simply, if you practiced until your legs fell off, you would still feel the same way. At times, it feels like it would be less painful to actually learn to skateboard.
The on-disc game has been put together in what looks like twenty-five minutes since – obviously – the package has blatantly been designed to sell on the strength of the skateboard peripheral. The downer is that that skateboard peripheral is next to useless. As far as I can see, someone came up with an idea for a controller, and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick started drooling at all the money he’d make, just like he does when a new Guitar Hero title enters development and gets shipped out the door to retailers in a total time of fourteen seconds. After all, this is the man that wants to “take all the fun out of making videogames” because fun clearly gets in the way of profit. What he’s managed to do though in this case, is take the fun out of the game itself, because Tony Hawk: RIDE is an absolute mess. You’d be an utter fool to waste £100 on this, especially when you could buy a Wii Balance Board and Skate-It (not brilliant, but at least it half works) or something like a complete Rock Band/Guitar Hero peripherals kit and still have change. The first four superior Tony Hawk Skateboarding titles and a PSOne to play them on would cost less, and would give you more entertainment for your buck. Hell, you could go into the store and pick up five completely random games for £20 a pop, and have a better than average chance of having more fun with them than you will with this absolute atrocity. I wonder how many kids will get this as their “big present” this Christmas?
