Distracted by Tony Hawk
26 August 2024
I must confess I have not played any Pokemon Emerald the past week because I have been so thoroughly distracted by Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, or THAW for short.
I don't remember precisely when I started playing the Tony Hawk games but I have a feeling it was early 2004, because I was in primary school but not yet in the final year. I started with Tony Hawk's Underground, which released November 2003 and quickly became the coolest game I'd ever played. Tony Hawk's Underground 2 came out October 2004 and was also pretty good, the story is a continuation of the first Underground game, but brings in the Jackass crew and.. uh, yeah. It was almost as much a Jackass game as it was a skateboarding game.
Then THAW came out in 2005 and quickly became the greatest game I have ever played. Not just at the time - it still holds that title. The story is weak but to be honest we're not here for the story, the controls are spot on. The tricks are extensive, you can even combine tricks to make your own special trick. The soundtrack is basically the reason I love the music that I love. My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Alkaline Trio, Rise Against, they're all in here! The levels are beautifully made, highly varied, and in storymode all connect together to form one map, but let's be clear: Open world this is not. The levels connect by a long, boring corridor that is clearly a masked loading screen.
I have so many memories in this game; like enabling a cheat to never fall off a lip trick, then leaving it on while my cousin and I went to play at the park so we could find out just how high a score we could get (if I recall correctly it actually started going backwards, I guess to prevent people doing exactly what we did); or the time I figured out how to essentially "fly" through the level by repeatedly getting off and back on the board, which meant I could access unintended areas like the background scenes of East LA or Kyoto. Speaking of Kyoto, I enjoyed that level so much I think this game was also responsible for my fondness of Japan at the time. I did try to learn Japanese when I was young, but it did not go very well.
It was also funny to see that a mission I struggled with as a kid, which actually caused me to rage-quit THAW the first time around, was still glitchy as hell now. In Beverly Hills a Frenchman teaches you parkour, and there's a particular trick where you run up a wall then jump that I could not do as a kid. This is an early mission in the second level, and I'm pretty sure I put the game down for months before trying again. It took me several attempts as an adult too, but eventually I figured it out - The move requires you to press R1 and up, then when you're on the wall you press down and X. However, if you hold down and X for even a second too long it won't work, it has to be a light tap. I was genuinely afraid of this mission when I started playing this week, that's how traumatised I was!
THAW was one of the few games I could play online too. I had a PS2, and although I received the kit to connect online for my birthday, for some reason actually getting it online was very complicated. I did get online with Underground, and that might have been where I learnt the flying trick, but mostly I remember THAW. I had a custom skater in all-white clothing, including a hoodie with the hood up, but with a red spiky mohawk that clipped through the hood, which was not normally possible. I thought it looked cool AF. Very emo, which about summed me up at the time.
When I started emulating on my Steam Deck it was only natural to seek out Tony Hawk's American Wasteland and now I know for sure that I don't love this game just because of rose-tinted glasses, it genuinely holds up as the best skateboarding game out there. The emulation is brilliant too, I only have a few framerate issues on levels that have a lot of dynamic props, or a lot of fire (e.g. Ruins). This could be something to do with the emulator's settings, I'm still new to it and might be doing something nooby like not utilising the GPU.
I'm going to try to get back into Pokemon Emerald soon, I just had to get some THAW out of my system first!
~ Honey