Tony Hawk's Underground - A Worthy Return? 47
Thanks to 1UP for their review of Tony Hawk's Underground, as the extreme sports title heads into stores for its fifth iteration, and the reviewer seems to approve, mentioning that "cinematic story makes single-player fun again", as well as lauding "user-created content options", including level and animation editors, that "have massive potential." Tragically, you can only play online using the PlayStation 2 version, a major blow for Xbox Live fans, contributing to IGN's rating of the title as "a solid, if not a perfect, outing", and the conclusion: "If you're a PS2 owner, go get it. If you're anybody else, you may want to just hold that thought before diving in." Finally, GameSpot basically approve, directly countering that "most of the game's goals don't tie into the story at all", but still praising it as "another great installment."
An educated opinion... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves"
Well, not really. As observed above, it's Microsoft's stringent Live guidelines that are preventing you from having your THUG online. Basically, we (Neversoft) refused to compromise on two points: 1. People should have to pay extra to play Tony Hawk online (players pay Microsoft for the privilege of accessing our online vault!?) and 2. Microsoft's Live 'guidelines' mandate certain things, some of which overlap with our online features. And, from a pragmatic standpoint, having our game be Live compatible means an entirely separate submission process for us, meaning the Xbox version would probably ship later than the other two.
On reviews:
The problem we're having with reviews, from my perspective, is the same across the board. THUG is larger and deeper than any console game has ever been. Now, I don't mean that as a blaring note on my own trumpet; THUG's size is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, anyone who invests in the game could probably play it for a month without running out of things to discover. The downside: effectively reviewing the game in a short time is nigh impossible. Some reviewers see the good (1up); some see the bad (Gamespot). This is not a problem particular to THUG; it's a problem with game criticism as a whole.
A single player can only ever offer his or her own experience with a particular game. As a designer you accept that, and you accept responsibility for every player's experience when playing your game. The frustrating part is that a game like THUG is that it must be designed with the assumption that people will invest a lot of time in it. This is not an unreasonable assumption considering the history of the series but it's frustrating as a designer because it means that people can't just pick up your game and have fun with it (see also: game critics). They have to be in it for the long haul.
I believe it was Jonathan Baron who observed that playing a game is like reading a novel; you invest much more time and effort than in something like a film or television program and are consequently rewarded with a richer, deeper, and more fulfilling experience (pardon my lazy paraphrasing.) That said, I also think that it's unreasonable to ask an underpaid hobbyist to spend more than a few hours with your game before giving his or her impressions of it. What I don't think is unreasonable is asking said critic to update that review at some point.
Now, I agree that playing a game is much more like reading a novel than watching a movie but I think where the analogy falls short is in the relationship between time invested and mastery, specifically in how predicable that relationship is. When you buy a novel you know that regardless of how quickly you read, reading the contents of each page means that you've finished that book. Not so with games (I'm assuming we're talking about reasonably designed games here, not the dregs.) They offer a different experience each time you sit down to play and they're self-canonizing: the more you play, the more learn about the game and the more skilled you become. The better you are at a game, the more fun it is to play. I usually avoid making generalizations but that one is universally true. You must master a game to unlock its full enjoyment potential and must therefore master it to effectively understand and critique it.
For example, I've seen quite a few reviews mention the runout/walking addition in passing, as though it really has no effect on gameplay. Forsooth! When mastered it redefines the gameplay. It's an entirely new verb. On the roadmap of Tony Hawk gameplay innovations it lies somewhere between manual and spine transfer, meaning it radically redefines the way in which you play the game. If you've only played the game for a short while this is not readily apparent, especially if you're playing the game the same way you played Ton