Tony Hawk: Ride

Remember the first time you played Guitar Hero? The tiny plastic guitar. The physical awkwardness. The fear of looking like an idiot. But before long, all that gave way to the euphoria, the fun, even reveling in looking like an idiot. Activision hopes you’re ready to look like an idiot again. Take that Guitar Hero guitar, replace it with a plastic skateboard, and get ready to Ride.

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Tony Hawk’s skateboarding series took a much-needed year off in 2008, capping a nine-year run with Neversoft’s Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground. Now the franchise looks reinvigorated, with a new developer and crucially, a new peripheral — a wireless, sensor-laden skateboard deck that tracks your every tilt, sway, and swerve. Taking the Tony Hawk series into the physical realm makes so much sense, you can’t help but wonder why it hasn’t been done before. Then it hits you — it has. “At his studio, Tony has big-ass arcade machines like Air Trix and Top Skater,” says Josh Tsui, president of Chicago-based developer Robomodo. “For quite some time, Tony has wanted to make a game where somebody can feel like they’re doing real skating.”

Real skating, of course, requires skill, but Tony Hawk: Ride unabashedly wants to lure those mass-market gamers who went gaga over Rock Band in Best Buy and bought the overtly physical Wii Fit as fast as Nintendo could make it. And just like you didn’t need to know yoga or drums to figure out those games, all you really need to play Ride is to have watched someone skate. Put the plastic, curved skate deck on the ground — no wheels, no trucks, just a curved bottom and a whole lot of wireless technology inside. Stand on it, and mimic what you’ve seen on ESPN and Mountain Dew commercials. To start things rolling, push off with one leg just like you would on a real board — a sensor reads your leg as it flies past. Lean left and right to steer left and right; lean on your back foot to manual, or stomp to pop an Ollie; lean back and pivot on the carpet to pull 180s. (Yes, you can spin 360 to do a 360 if you want.) More intense flicks of the board with your feet trigger different tricks, like kickflips and shuvits. The infrared sensors embedded in the sides of the board — one in each compass direction — weren’t functional in the prototype we tried, but you’ll hold out your hand over them to trigger grab tricks. That’s it — you’ve got nothing to hold onto but your pride. The rest is up to your sense of balance and developing muscle memory to pull off specific tricks.

And if you can’t develop that sense of balance…you can’t play. There are no traditional gamepad controls for Ride, because the game and the board controller have been developed in tandem; one would not exist without the other. Tsui offers an apt analogy: “I would love to play a first-person shooter on the Xbox 360 with a keyboard and mouse — but you know what, Microsoft is not going to let me. But luckily, a lot of the games are tuned to be played [with the gamepad]. So that’s the same way we’re approaching our controller: it’s a 1:1 relationship. Anything else is a compromise.” Think back to the Top Skater example: would you bring a gamepad into an arcade and expect it to control a coin-op machine? Would you even want it to? It’s a canny design choice that makes a clear break between the franchise’s past and present.

The board controller itself is a nifty marvel of engineering, and for our very first feet-on test, it...well, we’re not going to blame the board. We won’t pretend we looked graceful or felt anything but awkward in our first 10 minutes of play — leaning dramatically to either side, shuffling across the carpet as we shifted position, sometimes even falling off the inch-high platform altogether — but we definitely felt the spark. It reminded us of the first time we played Guitar Hero — we sucked, but with time, practice, and friends, we eventually became proficient and found it very rewarding. When we watched the early build of Ride played by someone with more skill, it was a beautiful thing to see; one experienced skater in the room lined up combos and manuals after just a few minutes of getting oriented with the plastic board. So there’s hope for the rest of us.

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