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Activision and developer Neversoft set the skateboarding world on fire when they released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for the Sony PlayStation last fall. Since then, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater has gone on to sell in immense numbers, has a sequel due in the next couple of months and has been released on almost all the available platforms – except for Dreamcast. For whatever reason, Activision decided not to pour its resources into a Dreamcast port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and instead gave Crave Entertainment the opportunity to do so. Now the Dreamcast version has been released - and what a version it is! Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the Dreamcast is all that the PlayStation version was, and much more. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the Dreamcast has had a bumpy start since it was first announced. The initially released screen shots showed an incredibly impressive graphical title that blew everyone’s minds. It was later discovered, however, that they were taken from a development kit, and not from an actual Dreamcast. The actual Dreamcast game still looks fantastic, though not quite as good as originally promised. And that there is the main difference between THPS on the PlayStation and THPS on the Dreamcast: visuals. The character model’s polygon count has been bumped up to allow more detail; the frame rate never slows down and is always constant and speedy; and filters have been added to erase pixelation and smooth everything out. There’s also been a nice improvement in the ways of the lighting, and overall the game is a major improvement. It does not look like a quick rush job put together in a couple of weeks, and Treyarch and Crave really did a nice job with the conversion.
The control scheme of THPS on the PlayStation was simple enough that it lends itself to the Dreamcast controller easily. Anyone who has spent any time with the game on the PlayStation will have no trouble adapting to the Dreamcast. All of the buttons are in the same basic positions that they were before, and it wasn’t long before I was linking together combo chains and grinding the night away. I still managed to crash at every available moment, but that’s more the fault of me being absolutely terrible compared to others, rather than the game itself. One of the complaints I’ve had with the game in general is that the characters seem to pull off the moves rather slowly, though after giving Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 a run, it seems that quirk will be all fixed when the sequel is released. It’s unfortunate that a four-player mode isn’t included in the Dreamcast version as was originally thought to be included, but the multiplayer modes from the PlayStation version have all made a successful leap, and that is just about as good. When one thinks about it, anyway, the space needed to skate properly is crowded enough in the two-player mode, and splitting the screen four ways would only cause more annoyance than there already was with two. Crave and Treyarch have done a great job in porting THPS to the Dreamcast, and even those who have played it extensively on the PlayStation will likely find some new found fun in this conversion. And for the few gamers who have not been exposed to the addictiveness of Tony Hawk yet, here’s your chance.
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