Recently, I found myself watching old clips of Tony Hawk's Underground on YouTube. It's like those sad old dudes who watch replays from ancient sports games in their spare time, except doubly sad because I also do that. It's hard to experience old games, much harder than it is to listen to music or watch a movie from 20 years ago. They might be available on some subscription program or other, but mostly your only option is to hope they still work on PC, usually after a lot of messing around with the various settings, or digging out your old consoles. Both are a lot of effort, so when I'm on a nostalgia kick, I just watch them on YouTube. Flicking through the videos, something struck me - why were there so many cars in Tony Hawk's Underground?
I've never really 'got' streaming, whatever there is to get. I don't watch people playing games in my spare time, I just play them myself. I engage with the biggest personalities in the sphere, knowing the impact the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amouranth, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Adin Ross, or Neekolul have on popular culture, but rarely watch any individual streams myself. Yet when I watch these old games, I get it. There's no commentary, no chat, no parasocial connection, just the thing I'm here for. I feel the same way when someone forces me to watch a TikTok 'reaction video' where it's just one person vaguely making a face while another video plays. Why wouldn't I just watch the original video? Maybe I'm just too old.
The point of all this is I understand the appeal of watching someone play a video game, so long as it's an old game I can't easily play myself anymore and I can't see or hear the person playing. This brings us back to Tony Hawk's Underground. It's my favourite game in the series, holding off stiff competition from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, and Tony Hawk's American Wasteland. Really, any from the main series bar THPS 5 could be my favourite on any given day. Even Proving Ground and Project 8 had their moments. But most often, my favourite in the series is THUG.
Underground was the ♚first in the series after the four Pro Skater games, and had a more rounded campaign that had a real story instead of just a string of skateparks loosely held together by a vague narrative. It also pushed customisation more than ever before, with you playing through the game as your custom character who begins as a nobody skater in the backstreets of New Jersey who slowly gains the attention of pros, rising and then falling out with his best friend as they compete for skating superstardom.
I remembered all of this from my playing days. I remembered jumping over the helicopter and manualling around Red Square in Moscow. I remembered Jane's Addiction, Nas, and Queens of the Stone Age in the soundtrack. But not the driving. While THPS 4 had you interacting with cars by skitching behind them (grabbing onto the back to be pulled along), Underground let you drive a variety of vehicles across the map. Mostly, these came in the various missions required to complete the game, and I think because I spent so long mindlessly twisting out like Mike McGill, I had forgotten this part of the game.
THUG was an evolution for the Tony Hawk's series, and with it for arcade sports games in general. The expansive story, customisation, and much bigger world you could roam more freely is part of the reason I remember it so fondly. However, it's clear looking back that the developers did everything they could to make this bigger and bolder in every way, and so the ability to drive was added in. It makes sense - driving games 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:often share the arcade appeal of Tony Hawk's, so folds into the world naturally. But looking back, it's weird. Tony Hawk's games are thought of as some of the best sports games have ever had to offer, THUG the pick of the bunch. Why did anyone think shoving driving into every other mission was necessary? Why don't I remember it? Did I ever enjoy it, or did my brain repress that part of it for me?
It's an odd experience looking back on one of your favourite games of all time and realising there's a whole element to it you simply don't recall. It would be like replaying The Last of Us and discovering that Joel stopped in every town to play pinball, and you couldn't progress in the story until you broke the bar's high score. And it comes back to the distance I have watching old games - if I was playing it, I would have discovered this driving at my own pace, in my own time, and maybe it wouldn't have been so odd. Instead I'm seeing streamers rush through the game with no time for idle kickflips, jumping into a car every five minutes. I always thought Tony Hawk's Underground was the best skateboarding game of all time. Turns out it's the best driving game too.