Tony Hawk's Underground (2003)

Bloodborne was kicking my ass, so I took a break and played Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Then Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus was kicking my ass. I needed a win. "I'll play Tony Hawk's Underground," I said to myself. "The last time I beat it on Sick Mode in like a day, this'll be a breeze."

That was, what, almost a year ago?

Let's start with the good. It's a Tony Hawk game, so there's a base level of fun baked into it. It is fun to skate around and grind on rails and jump off ramps and do kickflips. It just is. I don't know if there's any iteration of these games where it's not at least a little fun.

Also, I have said for years and stand by it, the story is great and Eric Sparrow is a Top 10 videogame villain. Yes there are a bunch of stupid missions involving donuts and walking a dog and collecting drunk musicians and whatnot but if you just look at core the story is pure drama: your best friend burns down a gang's house so you flee to NYC, where you start to make a name for yourself as a skater.

You earn a car that takes you to Tampa, where [redacted stupid nonsense involving strippers and a goat] and then you go to enter a tournament. But, what's this? BETRAYAL! Your best friend got in the tournament and you're shut out. So you impress Tony Hawk and he gets you into the tournament where you go head to head with your (former?) best friend, and kick his ass. But it's a near thing and you're both signed to the same team.

You meet up with the team in San Diego and...well honestly this part doesn't really matter to the story much, you do some skating stuff, etc. Then the team flies to Hawai'i. In Hawai'i you make up with your friend and together you try to find a place to film a sick skate vid. You manage to get to the top of a hotel that, uh, has halfpipes on the roof for some reason, so you do some tricks up there, and then you cap it off with doing a McTwist over a helicopter and landing on the roof of the hotel across the way. And your renewed best friend films the whole thing and is very happy for you, it's great. One of the proudest moments of your life.

The team flies to Vancouver to compete in a pro tournament. But what's this? BETRAYAL!! AGAIN!! Your (totally definitely former this time) best friend EDITED HIMSELF INTO THE VIDEO so it looks like he did the sick trick over the helicopter, and now he's in the pro tournament and you're not. But fuck that asshole, you sign up for the pro tournament anyway, you make it through every round, you go head to head with him again and again you kick his ass, this time on his own line. You're officially a pro! You're so busy celebrating you almost miss the bus to the airport.

In Moscow you're friend says hey, my bad, why don't we skate together like the old days, so you do, and it's great, and you go out drinking, and you guys steal a tank, and then you guys crash the tank, and then BETRAYAL!!!! your friend runs away and leaves you to rot in a Russian prison.

Fortunately there's a local spy ring that...are huge fans of skating??? Ok this bit would probably need to be re-worked for the movie, but anyway, the get you out of prison and after you do some favors for them they smuggle you out of the country.

Back in Jersey, you get back to your roots. You skate your heart out in your home town, impress Stacy Peralta who I guess is a big deal in real life probably, put together a team of some of the best skaters around, and make the best skate video ever. This is what you've always wanted, not shoe deals and parties but just skating to the best of your abilities. And then Eric Sparrow shows up. He offers to buy you out; not happening. He has nothing you want anymore.

Oh, is that so? Are you forgetting...the tape? That's right, Eric still has the original unedited tape, the one that proves you've always been the best. He'll skate you for it. He sets down a line that takes you across the entire level (which, I guess is the entire state of New Jersey?), he throws fireballs at you somehow, and you still beat him. You have the tape, he has nothing.

~FIN~

It's great, right?

Anyway on Sick Mode this game is too fucking hard. Part of it is that GameCube controllers are awful. Part of it is that I'm older. Part of it is that it's simply too fucking hard, man, like there is some bad design in here. Also I'm apparently the only person to ever ask "do the stat upgrades actually do anything?"

What was supposed to be a day or two of fun turned into weeks of pain and frustration. I made it almost all the way through the game but got stuck on "Combo the City," a mission that (somewhat prefiguring the final mission) has you skating around the city, hitting 41 spots in one combo. I just couldn't do it. And I had to come to terms with the lie I'd been telling myself.

You see, I didn't beat Sick Mode in a day the last time I played. Or rather, I didn't beat it honestly. I used cheats.

I didn't use them for the whole game the way I probably did as a kid, I really did make a sincere attempt of it, but if a mission was too hard I gave it a few tries and then turned on the relevant cheat to get through it.

I abandoned the game in shame. I was never the THUG master I thought myself to be, and I never would be.

Cut to 10 months later, I'm watching Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and I get to the part where Gandalf and Eomer arrive at Helm's Deep, and as their horses leap into the astonished Uruk-Hai I point and say, "Aaaand videogame." And now I really want to replay Return of the King for GameCube. At which point I might as well also replay The Hobbit (2003) and The Third Age.

But that THUG disc is still in the GameCube, and I can't take it out without giving it one more try. So I boot it up, I start skating...and I still can't beat it. What, did you miss the part where I said it's too fucking hard? It's too fucking hard! So I say fuck it and turn on cheats and it's actually still kinda hard with cheats on so it takes an hour and a half by the end of which my thumb is throbbing but I finally beat it.

And then I started thinking about the cheats. Because, you don't see cheats in games much these days. Unless there doing a retro throwback thing (or it's Rogue Lords where it's actually part of the game) they're not really a thing. You know what is a thing? Accessibility features.

That's all cheats are! They're just ways to make the game more fun if it's not built for your particular skillset or what you want from the game! We just stopped making people feel bad about using them by calling them something else! I never felt bad about using Celeste's Assist Mode because they didn't make me feel bad about it.

Hopefully by the time I'm, like, 35 I'll have finally learned how to have fun.

Anyway, THUG is kinda janky and GameCube controllers suck so I don't necessarily recommend playing it but it was pretty good for the time.

Tony Hawk's Underground is a huge change up for this series, slightly toning down the cartoonish aspects from the original games and taking a more realistic turn with added cinematics for a more story driven campaign mode.

Graphically speaking this title looks okay, looking a little rough for its release time. Mechanically speaking, it sticks with the usual gameplay style, adding very few new features.

One of the better features here is the build a park minigame, adding much more ascetic items and variety of choice.

Besides the clichéd story campaign and rough look, Underground is a fresh new direction for this series, making customization and narrative more of a force than previous titles.