Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 Hands-On

Following up on its excellent port of the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Treyarch is also in charge of the port of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 to the Dreamcast. The results are similar - the Dreamcast version of THPS 2 is a fantastic port that keeps everything you loved about the PlayStation version while enhancing the graphics and sound.

While the skaters look significantly better on the DC than they do in the original PlayStation version, the most noticeable difference is in the Dreamcast version's texture quality. The graffiti spread throughout the Marseille level is crystal clear, and the entire game looks extremely clean. The limitations imposed by the PlayStation's aging hardware have been addressed, and there's significantly less pop-up in this version of the game. Plus, there are a few extra graphical tweaks here and there. For instance, in the New York level, busting an ollie over a hydrant breaks it open and causes water to shoot into the sky. In the PlayStation version, the hydrants simply disappeared. The sound in the Dreamcast version is roughly the same, but the effects are played back at a higher sampling rate, giving the aural portion of the game a significantly cleaner sound.

While the PlayStation version had dedicated shoulder buttons for spinning and for switching stances, the Dreamcast triggers perform double duty. When you're on the ground, the L trigger puts you in a nollie stance or a fakie stance, and the R trigger switches you from a normal stance to a switch stance and vice versa. In the air, though, the triggers are used for spinning. Other than this slight difference, the game plays exactly like the PlayStation version - simply incredible.