Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3D is a retooled version of the game that started the skateboard video game revolution. Originally released for the PlayStation in 1999, THPS gave players an easy-to-understand control scheme that allowed for great flexibility, leading to elaborate freestyle skating. The variety of tricks and the great design of the levels made the game a classic, but later entries in the series introduced concepts that essentially make this first game obsolete. That makes it a tough game to go back to in its original form, and an even tougher game to go back to after it's been crammed onto an LG VX8000.
That's not to say that the act of getting a fully 3D game up and running on a cell phone isn't impressive on its own. Technically, it's pretty cool. The levels are larger than what you'd expect from most mobile games, and just about all the tricks from the PlayStation game have made the transition as well. The goal system has been revamped to allow for online competition. Each level has the five goals found in the original game, but now there are new goals for even higher scores, doing a set number of tricks in a run, using a certain number of tricks in a combo, and earning points without falling off your board. Each goal now has a set number of points--called "props" in the game because, hey, outdated hip-hop slang is totally tubular--assigned to it. Once you've earned enough props on a level, you can move on to the next. Three levels are competition-type in scope, and here you'll skate for a minute to receive a judge's score as you attempt to earn a gold medal. Your props are tabulated and used to unlock skateboards that enhance your stats, and they're also uploaded to an online scoreboard that, at the moment, isn't terribly competitive. Cruising through the game while completing little more than the bare minimum along the way should be enough to put you at or near the top of the scoreboard. And unless you're playing a Tony Hawk game for the first time, you should be able to get through the game's levels in a couple of hours.
While this mobile take on Tony Hawk has all the basics down pat, it's missing the final part of the puzzle: smooth, responsive control. While mobile phones have come a long way on the control side of things, some tricks require you to hit three buttons at once--a task the VX8000 is simply incapable of handling. To pull off these tricks, you'll instead have to tap the buttons in sequence, which isn't much of a solution. The level of imprecision introduced here will occasionally cause your skater to start a trick animation right before landing, causing him to crash and causing a dose of frustration in the process.
Graphically, you'll surely notice some very heavy draw-in. Large items, including moving cars, just sort of pop up from out of nowhere. The game's frame rate is playable, but you wouldn't really want to call it smooth, either. Of course, these sorts of issues are par for the course for the platform, and compared to other similar mobile games, THPS 3D does look quite nicely. The game also has good sound effects that do well with the sounds of skating, grinding, and so on. Unfortunately, there's no music outside of a small digitized loop that plays on the main menu screens.
How much you'll get out of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3D depends on your perspective. It's technically impressive, but that doesn't automatically grant it the same level of playability fans have come to expect from games with Tony Hawk's name on them. If you're either new to the series or strictly play games on mobile phones, chances are you'll be pretty impressed.
