Tony Hawk goes Downhill

By Tom Bramwell Published 7 February, 2006

With Jam. No word on butter.

There was going to be a joke here. It was going to be about Tony Hawk's career path - from Pro Skater to THUG before THAWing out and settling down to toast his life with Downhill Jam on it - but I've just checked and there's no bread and if I can't have some jam on toast then you're all just going to have to sit through a meaningless paragraph. There.

Activision's announced that the next Tony Hawk game will be called Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. It's due out in the next fiscal year (god we hate those things), so expect it sometime between April and next March. October/November-time's been a good bet for Tony Hawk games in recent years. No word on formats, either, but PS2/Xbox/Cube/Xbox 360/PC would make sense.

There's no word on what to expect from it yet, but we'd imagine a bit of a rethink after Tony Hawk's American Wasteland marked something of a downturn in terms of critical reception. Remember though: the answer to your troubles is NOT Bam Margera. Nor, you zeitgeisty sons-of-bitches, is it any of those reality TV shows featuring a stupid hotel heiress or fake marriage. We know what you're like.

You can put Jeremy Kyle in it if you want though. SHUT UP.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (30) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Talha #1 6 years ago

    Can we have one year, one single year, without a Tony Hawk game? For that matter, without a FIFA, PES, Tiger Woods, Mega Man, Mario, Need for Speed, Burnout, NFL, NBA, PoP, etc etc? Oh, I guess that's too much to ask.

  • Darkedge #2 6 years ago

    too fr
    (FR is a damn good acronym for fu*king rght.. or is that just me?)
    Edited by 1 at 07/02/06 @ 09:57

  • djchump #3 6 years ago

    @Talha and Darkedge
    Erm... What's the problem? You don't HAVE to buy it you know?

    Complaining about people making games you don't like is dumb - it's like complaining that car manufacturers keep making new cars. Why shouldn't these developers try to earn a living making games?

  • Talha #4 6 years ago

    djchump: Actually what I meant was, an yearly update should not mean dumbing down the game in some way. The problem is, I am a sucker for many of the games mentioned. That means CASH EXPENDITURE. And that means disappointment in case the game doesn't turn out to be what you expected. Which is happening increasingly these days. You just think maybe if they had skipped just this year, perhaps a game would have emerged which does better critically and commercially. See what happened to Burnout for instance.

    Unless they allow you to trade in last year's instalment for perhaps 10 quid ;-)
    Edited by 1 at 07/02/06 @ 10:09

  • Eldritch #5 6 years ago

    EA is flogging more dead horses than Tony Hawk has intact bones in his body.

  • OllyJ #6 6 years ago

    Neversoft all we want are good levels to skate in, think THPS 3 or 4 where you would play through it with all the skaters to unlock all of the boards and bonus charectors, these are sorely missing as all you unlock now is "policeman" "construction worker", when we used to get Wolverine! fucking WOLVERINE! can you see the issue!

    I don't know if I speak for everyone but I couldn't give a toss about a loading screen to be honest, I'd love to know how many people wrote to neversoft complaining about loading screens! I bet more have had something to say about skating through bland featureless "loading Tunnels"!

    I want a Hawks game that I want to get hiogh scores on, why can I spend hours in Meteos just getting high scores and in Hawks I spend 10 seconds landing a heelflip and getting the levels high score! there is no incentive!

    The last hawks game had an AWESOME Skatepark (Vans) yet it was used for ONE piss easy comp! Anyone who played THPS 2 will remember toiling away at Bullring until they won! Make it challenging! I was seriously bothered about how insultingly easy THAW was, give us a challenge, we like tough games!* Listen to us and make a fun skating game that is just about skating, attaining high scores, winning tourneys, learning skills and mastering it with a decent difficulty curve.

    We Don't want to hit people, don't really want to get off the board as your walk controls make Driv3r seem like Prince of Persia, we don't want faddy storyline with Cliche punk charectors, no throwing tomatos, driving, shopping trollies, luges, crap dialogue just skating pure and simple!

    *as in sick scores that are higher than 500'000 that most THPS players can achieve on any level within 20-30 secs of the 2 mins.


    /wants Hawks to be great again. my comments are propbably wasted here!

  • djchump #7 6 years ago

    @Talha: Ah I see - that's a fair enough point then - I'm also disappointed when a game series I like slowly gets worse as they churn the sequels out.
    Whilst the blame could be laid at the publisher's door for pushing yearly iterations so that there's not enough time to add enough to differentiate this year's version from last year's, I also think that decline is kind of inevitable with sequels.
    Thinking back to how much fun I had with (e.g.) Tony Hawks 1 or Tenchu 1, it was because they were refreshing new game ideas for me, so I really enjoyed them. But any sequels to Tony Hawks or Tenchu were obviously going to retread familiar territory so the sequels would never be as refreshingly fun as the first. Similarly with Katamari, Advance Wars etc... they're fun, but the same kind of fun as the first in the series ;-)

    That's why I like new IPs and I love my DS so much - it has opened up some new types of gameplay and fun for me. Looking forward to the Revolution for similar reasons ;-)

  • HarryB #8 6 years ago

    Jeremy Kyle's always right up for a scrap...

  • Blerk #9 6 years ago

    /awaits next year's "Tony Hawk's Uphill Gardening"

  • Talha #10 6 years ago

    No, make that 'Tony Hawk's Overhead Nuclear Grind"

  • V0oD0o #11 6 years ago

    I completely agree with OllyJ.

    Although, I have yet to consider any TH game a waste of my coin.

    I still sit and play though them, then mash through them again on Classic Mode. I do get my monies worth.

  • OllyJ #12 6 years ago

    VooDoo

    Do you think though that you get significantly less value though?

    I will only play through THAW twice, once on Normal (easy) and once on Sick (normal). Whereas THPS3 I played it about 15 times, each with all the characters and secret characters, unlocking all the boards (which they now give you all of right at the start of the game)

    On the thoughts of my Meteos comment, I reckon I'd like to see Leaderboards offline with pretty hard to beat scores (2 and a half million maybe depending on the level) and an achievements for getting no.1 across them all.

    I'd like to see a mode where you are given an object like three half pipes back to back and in one combo you have to get a high score, or one big rectangular rail then you get one combo to score big then post you score online whilst trying to beat the offline scores.

    Maybe even a mode where like Meteos you have to do something in the quickest time possible, for example a room with maybe 20-50 trickable objects where you have to trick on them all in a fast time, post your times online and beat the offline times, I believe every THPS gamer would prefer a mode like this where you kept having 20-30 second ultra addictive games, instead of trekking across LA to find some Punk that can barely speak English to tell you how to fucking Manual.

    anyone else got any ideas for the series? what would you like to see? (apart from Bam mutilated beyond belief)

  • spidermanalf #13 6 years ago

    Can we not have an Evel Knievel game?

  • reality_cheque #14 6 years ago

    I reckon a Paris Hilton game would be quite tricky. Negotiage the press without flashing your muff - it could be a boss level or something (judging by how difficult she seems to find it).

  • Cloudane #15 6 years ago

    Please Neversoft, go back to the series original roots that both Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2&3 are critically acclaimed for.

    I personally hated the free-roaming aspect of THPS4 but was enjoyable then along came the 'Jackass' inspired Underground 1&2 and the average American Wasteland we got last Autumn.
    Edited by 1 at 07/02/06 @ 12:38

  • reality_cheque #16 6 years ago

    Jackass has a lot to answer for, considering they're basically a TV show of your average drunk 17yr old in my hometown on a friday night.

  • Feanor #17 6 years ago

    "Can we have one year, one single year, without a Tony Hawk game? For that matter, without a FIFA, PES, Tiger Woods, Mega Man, Mario, Need for Speed, Burnout, NFL, NBA, PoP, etc etc? Oh, I guess that's too much to ask."

    Can we have a year without selfish people wishing games they don't have to play wouldn't come out when millions of other people are looking forward to them?

  • kangarootoo #18 6 years ago

    Mmmmmm.... downhill jam.

  • Artemus #19 6 years ago

    Neversoft must be bored out of their brains with this franchise.

  • Wobble #20 6 years ago

    THAW infuriated me by forcing me to 'relearn' all the basic mechanics before i could use them in story mode.. what the fuck was that all about?

    I'm glad I played oldschool mode first, because i only lasted about 15 minutes on the actual main game it was so annoying.

  • Hunam85 #21 6 years ago

    How about they ditch the stories and just make random interesting levels, who cares about minisota, i want cruise ship!

  • OllyJ #22 6 years ago

    Hunam, Cruise ship! you knows it!

  • Tomo #23 6 years ago

    Wow, just watched some Jeremy Kyle today actually. Coincidence. He is one straight talking mofo.

  • Pastici #24 6 years ago

    "How about they ditch the stories and just make random interesting levels, who cares about minisota, i want cruise ship!"

    Too right, why did then even want to put a plot in an arcade skating game. THPS 1-4 was basically skating for no reason, that *was* fun. Skating for a reason takes the fun out of the game, I had no incetive to play the game more after the story modes, they just wern't rewarding enough. I don't like that stat system too, you get them far too quickly. I'm just pissed off, glad to see that other people agree. They keep churning out the same crap, its infuriating, I keep expecting them to pull themselvs out of the shit with each new game yet they just go deeper and deeper.

    The only reason bam should be in it is to truck him round the head for ruining a great franchise.

    /crappy rant

  • Pho-Zoon #25 6 years ago

    I wouldn't mind if they actually did a full size, free-roaming environment, with loads of different areas, but it'll never happen.

    My prediction: 7 linear downhill courses.

  • Kavvy #26 6 years ago

    Can we get this back on-topic please?

    Tony Hawks Backstreet Burgling.

  • OllyJ #27 6 years ago

    "7 Linear downhill courses"

    Well if they are satisfying to skate over and over then that's fine....well maybe more than seven!

    and yes I actually liked the world of American Wasteland I just had no incentive to skate it at all, the loads were much worse as they all took place in really obvious tunnel systems.

    So really I 'd prefer 10 really different varied levels with loads of replay value, a couple of new game modes, and a couple more classic levels remade...Cruise ship...Tokyo...hangar...

  • Genji #28 6 years ago

    They should make a Tony Hawk FPS. With skateboards. Or a strategy game. With skateboards. Or... you get the idea.

    He could be the next Mario!

  • Triggerhappytel #29 6 years ago

    Why don't they just give the series a couple years' breathing space, and give Neversoft a chance to inject more variety into the next game (which, ultimately, is the problem with the series now IMO).

  • OllyJ #30 6 years ago

    skating variety yes agreed.

    any other variety no as Neversoft has always failed, just looked at the ill judged walking and driving sections!