The Time Has Finally Come... Tony Hawk Ride!

Short version: Tony Hawk: Ride is the Robomodo game you play on a skateboard-shaped controller with motion sensors, made after Proving Ground didn’t sell. I played it on PS3 with the board. The controller is impressive, but the game misreads almost every trick, grabs and pushes often don’t register and one challenge seems impossible. I gave up before the last level.

This game has come up quite a few times on the channel, and I have always said that I bought it when it was new. When I finally got my hands on a copy again and got into it, I noticed something horrible. Something that made me question everything. I actually had Shred, the much-improved sequel to this. I thought I was going to be in for a pretty rough time, but little did I know that I’d never actually played this worse version of the game. So I’m really reluctant to get into it. But I have to.

The board controller

Let’s look at the controller for a minute. They probably spent about 90% of the development time on the controller instead of the game, because it’s really not that bad. It’s kind of impressive, actually. It’s got all the buttons for the PS3 on it, and a big start button that you’re able to hit with your foot. You probably don’t need these controls on there at all, actually. I just navigate the menus with a normal controller. You can try to tilt, but that’s annoyingly hard.

There are a couple of issues with the controller, though. The D-pad doesn’t work, which is funny. I wonder if they just forgot to hook it up or something. If it was software, you’d think they could patch it. The other thing is the weird dongle it needs. Every system it came out on supports wireless controllers. It seems like it should be possible to just hook it up directly. Maybe there’s something about sensor inputs and stuff that the systems don’t like. Either way, finding this game without the dongle is next to impossible. These are always missing.

Trigger warning: mongos.

How did this game even exist?

So let’s try to play this game a little bit. How did this game even come to exist? Well, there were a few things that made this seem like a good idea at the time. First was Guitar Hero. It was doing really well and people loved it. Eventually, games like Rock Band, DJ Hero and all kinds of other games attempted to come up with their own peripherals too, with varying success. So it seemed like a hot market.

The other big thing was that nobody bought Proving Ground. It was not a popular game at all. With the higher budgets and bigger teams needed for the PS3 generation, they had to reinvent the series somehow. So Activision created Robomodo to get it done. Robomodo gets a terrible rap among Tony Hawk fans, understandably, but they kept getting put in rough positions. They had to build a team, reinvent skateboarding video games entirely and get it shipped within 2 years. With that in mind, it’s an impressive feat, but that doesn’t mean I want to play it.

Difficulty settings and the tutorial

When you start the game, you have three options: Casual, Confident and Hardcore. Casual is completely on rails. You can turn only at specified forks in the road. Confident will line you up for stuff, but you can tilt to turn. Don’t try to kickturn, though.

Hardcore is a hellscape that I don’t dare explore. I don’t know what it does differently, and I’m not going to find out.

You get started with a tutorial, which is okay. The whole game is framed in a phone, like all of the Hawk games from this time period, with heavily distorted videos of pro skaters telling you what’s going on. I think they did this to make it look more cartoony, but at some point you might as well just use the in-game models instead.

So you wave your foot by the side sensors to push, and wave your hands by them in the air to do grabs. You can manual by manualling on the board, and pop the tail and stuff. It all makes sense. It just doesn’t work well.

Flip tricks are a coin flip

Let’s look at flip tricks. After you pop the tail, you can tilt the board to the toe or heel side to do kickflips or heelflips. Pivot the board to do shove-its. Combine those to do various tricks. The accuracy is terrible, though. When it asks me to do something specific, it basically doesn’t matter. I just do 360 flips every single time.

Here’s a specific example. In one challenge, I have to do an ollie manual, then an “advanced tilt trick” off the kicker. I’ll talk about what it means by those names in a minute. Even on the ollie manual, where I wasn’t even thinking about doing a trick, I did 360 flips most of the time. Then for the actual tilt trick, I’m trying the best I can to keep the board straight and only tilt it, but it’s impossible.

Naturally, when your weight is on the tail and you tilt it, the nose will move a little to the side. It’s just what happens when you’re balanced on the corner of the board. But the game will interpret that as a 360 flip almost 100% of the time. How am I supposed to do a kickflip, or specifically a double kickflip, on purpose? I can’t. I just did this challenge over and over until it eventually happened by luck.

The thing is, this could have been fun. Ollie manual, hold your actual balance and then do a trick out. But it just becomes random. Do the exact right thing a hundred times, and you might get lucky enough for one to count.

And here’s the worst part! In the next challenge, I had to do an advanced flick trick, or a 360 flip. But when I actually make an effort to spin the board, it comes out as something else, like a varial flip or hospital flip.

Tilt tricks, flick tricks and other weird names

Let’s get into those weird names. It calls flip tricks “tilt tricks,” and spin tricks “flick tricks.” Ask any skater what a flick is, and it’s when you flick your ankle to make the board flip! So there were a bunch of times when it would tell me to flick, and I would try to do a kickflip instead of a shove-it, like it wanted.

This game is made for babies. So it’s trying to explain things to people who don’t know anything about skating, but it’s weird. It will say something like “lift the nose” where a skater would say “pop the tail.”

It’s not a big deal, but it’s just confusing. They seem to go out of their way to be accessible in certain ways, but then they don’t explain other things. I had a challenge where I had to do a spine transfer. How do you do that? Who knows. By chance, I had seen a loading screen that explained that you have to lift the tail to do one. Of course, I thought it said “pop the tail,” so it took me a while. But you just have to try to nollie and it will work sometimes.

Race mode

There are a handful of different modes in each level. Let’s take a look at all of them.

First is the race mode. The goal here is to get to the end in a certain amount of time. It’s hard to tell exactly what, because the timer doesn’t make a lot of sense. It doesn’t actually give you a time limit, so it isn’t doing you any good. And it’s not like you either pass or fail. You get a score based on how close to the target you get. But it’s all very unclear. And sometimes there are also these finish line things you have to collect? It’s weird.

There are timer icons that help you out if you want to collect them as you make your way through the level.

So the thing about this game is that they know that it’s weird and doesn’t play very well. So instead of making the steering work better or designing the levels a little better, they just make it pretty easy. Like, you can make a lot of mistakes and still absolutely destroy the challenge.

At least sometimes. One time, I got completely stuck. I have to ollie over a train at the end to clear the finish line. In the trick and challenge modes, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, you can clear it no problem. In the race, though, you absolutely have to hit the speed boost to clear it. But it’s really hard to hit, and it aims you right at the penalties. I had a ton of trouble hitting it, and had to retry over and over. By the time I got it, I completely failed the race.

The next time I did it, I found a better route and completely killed it with a clean line and a bunch of timer icons. I thought I would have gotten the top score, but I only did okay. But this is the exception more than anything.

Overall, the races are pretty terrible. But I’m sure you already got that.

Trick mode

Next is the trick mode. This is just a high score challenge, basically. And it’s dead simple. You just string together some combos and win. You can land a bunch of grinds into manuals and get some multipliers going.

Like I mentioned with the race mode, they just make your goal really low. You can bail a huge combo, waste most of your time and still beat it. That’s the only way to keep the game fair when the controls don’t work.

The major problem with this mode, aside from being boring, is the tricks. Supposedly, there are at least a hundred. Including stuff like hospital flips and even kiwi flips. But you have almost zero control over what you do. Can you do a shove-it without tilting the board whatsoever? Probably not. You’ll do a varial flip, a 360 flip or the heelflip versions of those. Anything else is kind of luck.

What about grinds? In theory you can do all kinds of them, but you’ll just do 5-0s over and over. That way you can land in manuals and you’ll be fine. You don’t get punished for redoing the same grind over and over, so there’s not much downside to it.

One cool thing about the grinds is that you could, in theory, move around and do whatever you want. You could spin sideways and turn it into a tailslide or bluntslide or whatever, but it never works. Lean back on the tail, turn 90 degrees frontside, and you MIGHT do a tailslide, but there’s a 97% chance that you won’t spin at all, or maybe even spin the opposite way. As soon as you start spinning, you aren’t matching the screen anymore, and you’ll eventually land sideways and bail.

And of course, spinning basically doesn’t work. In theory you can pivot and do 180s and 360s, but here’s what happens when you try. Sometimes you get sideways, and sometimes nothing happens. Sometimes you’ll be facing forward and it’ll think you’re going fakie. It’s a mess.

But as far as trick mode is concerned, doing specific tricks doesn’t matter. It’s like Wii waggle games, but with a skateboard. You just kind of shake back and forth and eventually you’ll win. Sounds like a fun time, doesn’t it?

Challenge mode

Next is the challenge mode, which is both the best and worst part of the game.

In theory, it’s exactly what the game should be. It starts you out in a certain spot in the level, and it gives you a line or combo to do. Ollie up onto this thing, do a trick into a manual and kickflip off. That kind of thing. This helps solve the problem of just randomly doing crap. You have a specific goal, so it keeps you focused. A lot of times, these are actually fun. But there are problems.

Mainly, it’s the broken controls. You’ll have problems from the very start of the challenge. Often, you’ll try to push to get going, and nothing happens. There’s a graphic on the bottom of the screen that shows which sensors are firing off. Clearly I’m pushing. The game KNOWS I’m pushing, and it’s displaying proof that I’m pushing. But my character won’t move. Why not? I have no idea. It’s just broken. This happens all the time.

Or how about this? There’s a challenge to do a couple of grabs. Grabs never work. I ollie, the grab sensor is picking up my hand, but nothing happens. I’d say if you’re in the air and you wave your hand over the sensor, there’s a 25% chance you’ll actually do a grab. When it wants you to do two in a row, you’re basically screwed.

At one point, I somehow did an indy grab. I didn’t actually come near that sensor at all, though.

Or what about this? I have to get 3000 points in one area of the level. I got more than 3000. But guess what? I failed. I had to do it probably 10 times before it let me continue.

The impossible nollie challenge

But here’s the worst one. This challenge, as far as I can tell, is 100% impossible. Here’s what you do: nollie nosegrind the rail, then nollie through two of the hoops.

The nollie nosegrind is no big deal, except that you’ll get stuck not pushing a lot of the time. And it keeps counting mongo pushes from something. Maybe I was too close to the wall? I don’t know.

But that part is pretty easy. Getting the first nollie through the hoop is possible, but it’s pretty tough. With some practice, I got kind of consistent with it. And I got a ton of practice, because the second nollie is impossible. I tried this probably 50 times and got nowhere. I even cheated! I didn’t plan on cheating in any way for this game, because I wanted to suffer through it the way it was designed. But for this one, I sat next to the board and did it with my hands. So my timing and control were perfect. Even so, I never managed to finish this one. It drove me crazy. If this wasn’t relatively early in the game, I would have quit by then.

Halfpipe mode

There’s one more mode, the halfpipe. You might wonder how you’re going to do McTwists and stuff with the base controls of the game, and you won’t. It’s actually got a totally different control scheme. You face the TV sideways, and you can lean forward or back to do blunts or nosestalls. To do air tricks, you lean one way or another and ollie. Your character will do something random. This is just like the high score mode. Just kind of move the board around a lot and you’ll probably beat it.

The menus

There’s one more thing I haven’t mentioned yet: the menus. This game is super awkward to get around. There are layers and layers of menus that don’t make any sense. The game makes you pick a stance every single time, then you sit through multiple loading screens, then an autosave screen, and tons of popups for stuff you unlocked. It doesn’t say what, and I really couldn’t care less about this stuff.

Is it worth playing today?

In the end, I got to the level before the last one, and I gave up. The difficulty started to get legitimately hard, almost as hard as it should have been if the controls worked. I spent about 4 hours total on the career mode, being pretty thorough and going back to clear things better. I could probably have finished it in that time. And maybe a grand total of 15 minutes of that was mildly enjoyable.

I don’t know about you, but for a $120 original asking price, I’m not so sure it was worth it.

How would I fix the game? No races, and more challenges, but challenges that don’t require specific tricks.