Dear Tony Hawk…
You may or may not have read about this, but yesterday Tony Hawk defended the frankly shameful review scores for his latest bone-headed endorsement, Tony Hawk Ride. A game which was never going to be any good, as they’ve been getting steadily worse and worse since Tony Hawk’s 3. I say defended, though it was more a violent outburst towards anybody who disagrees with him, and in the case of the game, I imagine that’s probably everybody.
I was going to post a review for this game up today, or tomorrow, like any normal reviewer would. However, this outburst on Hawk’s part really hit a nerve with me. I’ll admit that at the age of twelve I used to skateboard, I wasn’t particularly good (I kickflipped once, badly, by accident) but I was competent enough to know how a skateboard handles and the general feel for it. For that reason, I really wanted this game to be good, before release and certainly expected it when it carried such a hefty pricetag.
He called us, your Humble Narrators “snarky critics” who had made up their minds before we’d even seen the game, let alone played it. So yeah, Tony, I guess this is true for everybody who has ever reviewed a game ever. Not the fact that you might have blindly endorsed a shoddy bit of technology, which admittedly had some potential, and up until you actually start steering the damn board, you can really see it shine through. Oh no, definitely not the fact that you’ve been flogging this long-dead horse for years after it was still feasible and you can’t appreciate the fact that the fans of the series have still painstakingly gone out, bought the game and been increasingly disappointed with each iteration? No, it’s not the fact that this series is dead and you’ve milked a grossly magnificent figure out of a franchise and that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to let it go. You jumped on the motion-controlling bandwagon and it backfired, you could have walked away from it, unscathed, without losing too much credibility. You tried something new and it failed, no biggie, the franchise is so big that future iterations could always repair the damage done. But no.
How dare you tell us how to do our bloody jobs, sitting on your high horse, looking down on all you see like 
some grandiose Sheik of the land. Our job is to play the games, evaluate and ultimately criticize the game for what it is, and in this case it’s a misguided hunk of nothing. Can you honestly, hand on your heart, tell people to buy this piece of absolute arse for £90? Especially in times of economic hardship in what I like to call ‘moneygeddon’? The price of three standard games and most likely superior games? What gives you the right to criticize the critics for reviewing a game that you’ve endorsed, as if them saying that the game is terrible is somehow a personal attack on you? Shouldn’t you be promoting actual-skateboarding, as opposed to the half-arsed, living-room nonsense? You’re in the most overweight country in the entire world and you, an alleged ’sportsman’ is promoting video games over his own sport? Get back on your skateboard and please, somebody shut him up. Screw you Tony Hawk, I refuse to buy anything that even has the remote stench of your self-righteousness self about it.
Now for the review: Don’t buy it, whatever you do, do not buy Tony Hawk Ride. It’s awful. I mean really awful. Don’t even play it. Don’t even think about it. Don’t even rent it. If you pass Tony Hawk in the street, don’t even acknowledge him unless it’s throwing some rotten fruit at him when he has his back turned.
21 Comments
“Our job is to play the games, evaluate and ultimately criticize the game for what it is”
That is EXACTLY what a review should be. The sad thing is that at least from this generation of consoles, it hasn't been like that at all. Reviews now are opinions of people about the game, and if they don't like it, the game is bad. They compare every FPS with halo, they take off points because the game didn't have something like the other game, or some crap like that.
I respect your job, but gaming journalism has been going down the drain at exponentially high speed. Reviews are not informative anymore. They are a biased waste of words that don't take the game AS IT IS, just like you said..
Hahaha this is genius. Who needs another plastic peripheral in there closet anyway? If you want a good skateboarding game, go buy Skate or Skate 2, not this rubbish.
The problem with 'New Media' is that it's entirely subjective. People want opinion, hence why the most popular papers in the United Kingdom are the tabloids. They take facts, or more accurately they select certain aspects of that fact and bolster an opinion onto it. People want opinion and more accurately they want someone to tell them what to do.
In the game of videogame journalism, although 'journalism' is a very loose term, people want a voice, a personality, hence why Yahtzee is one of the most prolific 'reviewers' on the internet, even though by the gaming press he's generally regarded as not being 'proper'. I'm sure there's a happy medium, somewhere in there, and I hope that in my reviews I somehow strive to be in that region.
he defended the game against from bad reviews,
he didn't “defended the frankly shameful review scores for his latest bone-headed endorsement, Tony Hawk Ride” like you wrote, he criticized the reviews
The game may be a big bag of rubbish controls and weak execution and Hawk may be as dumb as any other sportsman but you sir have stolen the term “moneygeddon” from Charlie Brooker and claimed it for yourself.
The problem with his comments is that he implied that the reviewers giving it bad scores hadn't given it a proper chance. In reality, the first couple of reviews, which were from those who played the game for a few hours at an activision-hosted event, were much higher than those which followed. In other words, the good review scores were from those who hadn't given it enough time, not the other way around.
This article is pathetic, and is just plain insulting. You slagged off tony hawk – go you. This is a poor piece of journalism to say the least.
Oh my god someone forward this to Tony Hawk now. Best. Article. Ever.
I've been rumbled, haha. You have no idea how much I adore that man, kudos to you for spotting it.
It's normal to promote your own sh!t as if it don't stink, I mean who wants to be known as the smelliest poo ever? certainly not Tony but it does look like a big piece of turd, no offence Tony but the Ride seems like a painful one.
Ride really does seem to have potential. However, the devs didnt take the proper time to fully use what they had. Thus, turning the $120 (US) game into a raging pile of wasted money. Seriously, im ashamed that games are even being produced like this. I agree that Hawk should just drop the series before making himself look like an even larger asswhipe. But, I honestly dont care too much at the moment, it just snowed a shit-brick out, and im going snowboarding tomorrow!!!
Cant wait!
“Our job is to play the games, evaluate and ultimately criticize the game for what it is”
essentially, is it not the opposite of what your doing right now? Your voicing your opinion on a franchise. I'm sitting here reading an article on your opinion of Ride, and your opinion of Tony Hawk, without any real fact, and defiantly not in a informative manor. I understand this is an opinion piece, but then how can you say its “our job” to do what your saying, in an article doing quite the opposite. Is this not part of your job as well? or are we reading a post from your personal blog?
What you've written here is essentially a slightly off version of what your defending. Not to mention your just sinking down to his level buy insulting him, at least he didn't go all out and say “ALL OF THE REVIEWERS ARE DOUCHEBAGS AND WANKERS”, editing photos of them with insults. So you've even sunk lower.
Sorry, but this one I don't agree with at all. Of course, this is just my opinion as well.
lol
the last tony hwaks i played was on PS1 and it was great… were did it all go wrong
what a terrible article. what the hell is this site? childish and silly
No one can be taken seriously as a journalist when they have a photo of Tony Hawk and the words 'Wanker' written on it in the article. That's just pathetic, seing as you are a journalist I thought you'd be mature and find someone to articulate your feelings and not display them in a childish manner. And nice steal of Brooker's terminology, he wouldn't vene give this article the time of day. And Ride looks rubbish
What you're missing is the fact that he stated in the first two paragraphs that this article was going to be a legitimate review, but due to Hawk's temper tantrum, it irked him enough to write an opinion piece on the incident.
It's all there in black and white; and though not worded how I went on to explain it as, it's still most definitely there.
Majority of what you've said, given the prior paragraph, is pointless. Though I do agree that the pictures were uncalled for.
great review, lol. I agree that Tony just needs to move on. Either reinvent the franchise and come out with something badass, or give it up and move on. There are plenty of other ways to make some more money.
hmm, reinvent the franchise. I'm not sure about that, I think this is what they tried to do and failed miserably. I think there is still an audience out there that would love to just see another game like tony hawk 3. Skate can be a more serious skateboarding game while tony hawk remains the over the top game it once was.
So where can I read about his “violent outburst”?