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"Most snarky critics had their minds set before ever seeing/playing the game.
I'm proud of what we created; it's innovative, responsive & fun."
-- Tony Hawk responding to the negative reviews for Tony Hawk: Ride
It's perfectly understandable why Activision believed Tony Hawk: Ride would be a success.
Veteran skateboarder Tony Hawk reportedly came to Activision with the idea of creating a peripheral-based evolution of his stagnating skating series. Based on Activision's success with the Guitar Hero franchise, the internal excitement for DJ Hero and the huge reaction Nintendo's seen with motion and hardware accessories on Wii, Tony Hawk: Ride was by all rights a sound business decision.
Unfortunately for Tony Hawk: Ride, its success was premised on a philosophically flawed notion about why these games click. In this crucial misstep, the game doomed from day one. The primary reason games like Guitar Hero and Wii Sports have been such monstrous successes and resonate so intensely both with gamers and large groups of people who on any given day wouldn't even consider themselves gamers is because they're rooted in fantasy. These games let them do something they cannot do in real-life.
I couldn't finish the tutorial in Tony Hawk: Ride, unable to progress past the introduction sequence. The start of Tony Hawk: Ride removes the ability to change the skater's direction, having the user focus on understanding basic manipulation of the skateboard peripheral itself. You start with ollies (accomplished by tilting the board back with one foot) and progress from there. It's a few sections before the game asks the player to differentiate between tilting the board up and then twisting it left or right, or tilting the board up and moving it left or right before setting it on the ground again.
I was, uh, unable to differentiate the two.
Instead of pulling off a flip trick or whatever, I knocked into the tiny Christmas tree next to the couch a few times. Before long, I turned off my Xbox 360 and concluded Tony Hawk: Ride just didn't work. I've been an advocate of games using peripherals to enhance experiences for years, but they only work as an extension to escape into a fantasy and pretend you're good at some thing you're not. Tony Hawk: Ride wants to teach you how to ride a skateboard for real. There is very little fantasy involved. In most respects, Tony Hawk: Ride is an interactive tutorial for actually learning how to skateboard.
It's not a surprise when someone wants to learn how to play the guitar after experiencing Boston's "More Than A Feeling" for the first time in Rock Band (though it's probably more Fall Out Boy) But there's also a reason individuals who are already well-versed on the guitar will still find themselves sitting down with this simplified version of the real thing and enjoying themselves: it's easier, an escape from the reality that most of us will never possess the same abilities as The Who's Pete Townshend.
Tony Hawk: Ride is an interactive tutorial for actually learning how to skateboard
I've never bought the argument Rock Band or Guitar Hero don't make any sense when you can just learn to actually play. Tony Hawk: Ride, however, is a different story. Pulling off random tricks is not difficult in Tony Hawk: Ride, as it's possible to create a string of stylized moves by just hysterically flailing about, but when tasked with doing specific kind of tricks, Tony Hawk: Ride requires a very real set of learned physical and mental memorization that's more akin to, well, real skateboarding.
That's the crux of Tony Hawk: Ride's failure and why Hawk's assessment of the critical response is off-base. The game is simply not fun and when I tried to play, it only served as a painful reminder that I can't skateboard. I didn't need a video game to make that any clearer, but failing to execute what the game was proposing to be a very basic skateboarding trick over and over only rubbed the fact in my face. Thanks, Tony Hawk: Ride, but I already knew pulling off a flip trick wasn't in my repertoire. No need to remind me.
Adding a realistic peripheral doesn't make me feel like a bad ass skateboarder, but the original games made that a great, accessible experience. Those games let me do something basic I can't actually do -- balance on a skateboard. Tony Hawk: Ride assumes that's something I want to learn. As it turns out, I don't (and can't). If I change my mind...you know what? Maybe I'll just buy a real skateboard.
[image credit: flickr / aldoaldoz and jmtosses]
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back2schoolboo
What I don't understand is the varied reviews this game is getting. One source, which I forget it is, gave this game a 9 out of 10. G4 gave it the equivalent of a 2 out of 10. Maybe it just depends on the reviewer. The person who gave this game a 9 out of 10 probably had some skateboarding experience. This proves G4's point: this game is not for people who do not go skateboarding.
slushomg
Don't forget that Guitar Hero also has a huuge learning curve once you add that fifth button. The way the player has to use hand-eye co-ordination like never before is the same as the feeling of trying to play real guitar. This is the same as your problem with Tony Hawk Ride.
The fact that you gave up very quickly completely supports Tony Hawk's point about how the game is being written off. If you continued to practice, just as with Guitar Hero, you would get better quite quickly without really noticing what you've done to improve. You'll get a feel for what the board actually wants to detect instead of what's been plainly explained for a particular trick, and you'll realize the same truth that plagued many of the more complex Wii motion control games: People don't like what they don't understand. As soon as you realize you are the one who is not playing right, and Tony Hawk Ride begins to succeed in its goal of making you play games in a different way (something that does require patience), you might start to agree a little more with Tony Hawk's opinion of critics. Keep in mind that not all critics reviews were bad. Some were through the roof.
You say that people only liked Guitar Hero because it's a casual version of real guitar that plays like a casual video game and that Ride is NOT this way, but I don't think that's true. I imagine big rooms of excited families coming together for Christmas having a lot of fun with and being amazed by this technology, and for them the fun will be in learning how to play properly in the first place. It's only the strict, or should I say \"snarky,\" game critics and hardcore gamers alike that will come into the game wanting it to work like a great, practical, already-established type of game instead of letting the game take command of how everything works. Critics and gamers seem to not have that kind of patience.
I realized all of this when I played the skateboard mode on Wii Fit Plus. I was captivated by it for the first few challenges, but was immediately frustrated when moving on to more difficult tasks that required a lot of steering. I thought to myself, \"this just doesn't work. And it's okay that it doesn't work, because it's just one minigame in a huge package that I did have fun with.\" But then I gave it a few more chances, and I realized that the board was being perfectly honest: I WAS technically distributing too much weight to the side I didn't want to turn towards. But it was as if I wanted the board to read my mind that I wanted to turn left instead of right. That's not how it works. I have to be able to control my balance (the entire point of this minigame in Wii Fit) so I can better tell the board what I want to do. Once I realized I was completely in the wrong and that the board DOES in fact work, I actually had a lot of fun with trying to make myself better at the game, even if I kept messing up horribly.
This can be applied to Ride itself in a much bigger way, since the game is far more complex and works much better than the simple Wii Fit mini game. The truth is, the board DOES work. Beyond that, critics and gamers have not been adding any other criticism, other than the idea that \"it doesn't add anything new to the series,\" but I would think that a swanky, innovative (though not immediately intuitive) board that detects your movements is enough of an addition.
gravy666
I thought it had something to do with the fact that if you're standing on a skateboard-like contraption, you'd rather it be on a real skateboard actually skating.
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