How the Manual Ruined Tony Hawks Pro Skater's Scoring System

[weaverska]

Tony once wrote in his autobiography that the original THPS was a bridge between Skateboarders and the rest of the world, it allowed people to experience that life, without having to spend many a year taking a beating from the ramps.
But with the limitations in technology at the time, the game wasn't as fluid and smooth as real life skateboarding was, and adding the Score element, that certain tricks were worth more points than others, that was basically a jab at the ideas of imposing rules on skateboarding.

Eventually it took the route of all video games, and jumped the shark in a way, (Literally in TH:AW)
I mean, at the end of a day, its a video game, people didn't want to play it and be brutalized by it. Nobody wants to play a game that emulates skateboarding so closely, that they could spend 20 minutes on one ramp, trying again and again to land a simple enough 540. In the games its a piece of cake, in reality, it takes a lot of time and effort to be able to do one of those as flawlessly as the games make it.

Oh, and if anything, the manual is one of the closest elements to real skating in that game.
The jumps are greatly exaggerated, nobody gets that much air off a quarter pipe from standstill.
The grinds don't obey the laws of physics as well as they should (ever heard of friction?)
The stall/plant lengths are very OTT (Even hawk himself can only pull off a Gymnast Plant for a short period of time, not like these superhero-esque skaters in the game, perfectly capable of sustaining themselves vertically, supported by just one hand for great periods of time)
But with time, the manual included more and more tricks, from pivots to caspers, to truckstands and primo, even handstands! (And for those of you who claim it isn't realistic, go check out Rodney Mullen doing flatland, it'll make your head spin!)

Still, the overall theme to those games were to be a bridge between skaters and non-skaters, using video game mentality to poke fun at the new rules being pushed on skateboarding.
Point is, its a video game enjoy it.

And yes, Skate was a good game too, more realistic and fluid to match the feeling of skating for real, but it too went and jumped the shark (Again, literally in Skate 3) with the Hall of Meat challenges and all that jazz.

Still, we should all be thankful for the entertainment they've brought us, i mean i started skating because of THPS2, and it really made my teenage years a lot better, its brought a lot of good things into my life.
So thankyou Birdman

[Storm12]

The thing that ruined the tony hawk games was trying to add a story, this started when THUG came out, then it just got worse. And while skate is a more realistic skating experience, the tony hawk games were never ever about realism... They were about doing things on a board that were not possible at all and racking up huge scores! I have a feeling that sometimes sports gamers(Myself included) expect too much realism from a game, sometimes you just have to get over the weird stuff and enjoy it.