Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

[SchizoidFreud]

TONY HAWK's PROVING GROUND

 

Published by: Activision

Developed by: Neversoft

Release Date: Fall 2007

Also available on: PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS

 

Official Website : http://www.thpgonline.com/

 

 

BACKGROUND

 

Activision announced the latest edition to the long-running Tony Hawk series, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground. The game will put more emphasis on developing the player's character and aims to give them the freedom to choose their own paths and style of skating.

 

Proving Ground will include a video editor complete with visual effects for creating what Activision calls "epic skate videos." Players can visit the online Skate Lounge to hang out with friends and customize the pad to their liking. While skating, the game will move from single-player to online seamlessly.

 

"This is the largest, deepest, and most compelling Tony Hawk game ever," said Joel Jewett, president of developer Neversoft. "Proving Ground will throw you so deep into the lifestyle of skateboarding that you won't be able to get out. Hands down, it's the most exciting Tony Hawk title yet."

 

 

GAMEPLAY

 

The big improvements in Proving Ground aren't extraneous storylines and such, but rather core features that tie directly into your skating repertoire and what you're able to do with it. For example, the Skate Lounge will be your showpiece of sorts. Something like a blank create-a-park warehouse, the Skate Lounge starts out as a clean slate, but as you work through the game and unlock items you can put them in your lounge any way you'd like. Rather than being stuck on preset angles like the park creators were in previous Tony Hawk titles, you're given full control over how and where you position objects, allowing for much more customizability.

 

The Skate Lounge is very much like a custom skate park, except that you're able to use it to show off your in-game achievements as well. For example, you can put a TV (or even ginormous project screen) in the Lounge and run any video you've unlocked or recorded on it for others to see. Once you have a place to skate, you can then invite your friends into your Lounge and fire up a multiplayer game inside your home away from home.

 

The skills translate into very different gameplay elements with riggers being able to add kickers, rails, and more to areas, while Career skaters get Nail the Trick, Nail the Grab, and Nail the manual. The Hardcore get bowl grinds and the ability to check people. While that sounds like you would have to choose one skill over the other, Hawk 9 does a nice job of integrating all of the classes. It's not that a Hardcore skater can't perform Nail the Trick moves or that a Rigger can't knock someone on their butt. The classes reflect what goals you choose and the choices you make in the story. But you can do any of the moves -- how well you do them depends on your skill level. Proving Ground offers a full-featured video editor, revamped multiplayer, and a customizable skate lounge where players can skate with others online in "the ultimate skate pad." The game's story for career mode will be determined based on the skater class chosen. Proving Ground will also include real-time changes to the skater's appearance based on the amount of injuries inflicted on the character with scars remaining after bails. In addition, the previously excluded Create-a-Park feature has been confirmed to return with over 400 skateable pieces.

 

SCREENSHOTS

 

 

LOCATIONS

 

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground will be located on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Confirmed landmarks include FDR Skatepark and the LOVE Park (Both of which were previously included in another game in the Tony Hawk franchise Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2).

 

SKATERS

Career skaters

Hardcore skaters

Rigger skaters

Tony Hawk

Mike Vallely

Daewon Song

Ryan Sheckler

Dustin Dollin

Jeff King

Bob Burnquist

Lance Mountain

Rodney Mullen

Nyjah Huston

Andrew Reynolds

Bam Margera

Stevie Williams

Jereme Rogers

Vanessa Torres

Arto Saari

 

SOUNDTRACK

 

At the Gates – "Slaughter of the Soul"

The Clash – "Clash City Rockers"

Roots Manuva - "Chin High"

Maylene and the Sons of Disaster – "Memories of the Grove"

Silversun Pickups – "Well Thought Out Twinkles"

Voltera - "It beats for you"

Killswitch Engage - "My Curse"

Cradle Of Filth - "Gilded c*nt"

Revolution Mother - "Come On"

Oasis - "Supersonic"

 

 

P.S. I personally think that this game will be bested by EA's "SKATE" -- MT

[SchizoidFreud]

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground Updated Hands-On

 

What kind of skater are you? Are you the kind that likes to skate for the glory: the magazine covers, the endorsement deals, and the fame and fortune that come with it? You could be of the technical variety, the kind of grinder who gets more satisfaction out of finding and creating new places for skaters to perfect their craft. Or you may be the kind of skater who's not looking for the glory, but rather the sheer thrill of lighting it up on four wheels. Perhaps your personal approach is a mixture of all three of these different paths. Regardless of your philosophy, Activision's upcoming Tony Hawk's Proving Ground will likely be able to scratch that skating itch. We had a chance to spend some extended hands-on time with a recent build of the game to see how the different styles in the game add up.

 

The three different paths in Proving Ground are career, hardcore, and rigging. Career-path skaters are those looking to make a living as a pro, get the magazine covers, and the endorsement deals that follow. The hardcore path is for skaters who are in it for the love of the game, but aren't above laying out a little street justice in the process. The rigging path will challenge your building chops by giving you the tools to create your own ideal skatepark.

 

The slightly wider net of skating approaches is the means to an end in Proving Ground's story--in short, becoming the best skater around. As you play through the game, you can focus on any of the different paths available to you at any given time. Spend some time building an impromptu skate paradise in your favorite section of Washington, D.C. (one of the three cities featured in Proving Ground, along with Philadelphia and Baltimore), or go deal with some thugs who've taken over Philly's famous FDR Skatepark. Completing these various missions will earn you new abilities across all of the different career paths in the game. For hardcore missions, you'll earn upgraded abilities for your skater, such as skate-checking. As a rigger, you'll earn new items you can use to build out your skate parks. In one D.C. rigging mission, your job will be to customize the Air and Space Museum into an indoor skate park, and you'll earn objects such as rails, jumps, and more.

 

Along with story-specific challenges, there will also be a ton of spot challenges you can try at any point. These are your basic challenges that will test your skating skills along a number of different events, including rail grinding, jumping, and, naturally, racking up trick combos. A couple of the challenges we tried during our hands-on time with the game included a timed race event that had us skating through a series of trickily placed checkpoints, and a long-jump challenge that had us trying to clear an overpass. For the latter challenge, we had to make liberal use of the new "aggro kick" system, which will give a boost of speed, provided that you time each kick correctly.

 

Last year's Tony Hawk's Project 8 introduced a new gameplay feature--nail the trick--that let players have more control over their board's movement during jumps than ever before. The dual-analog-stick system, which let you kick or flip your board in any direction while your skater flew through the air in slow motion, has been extended in Proving Ground with a couple of new additions: nail the grab, and nail the manual. To nail the grab, you pull the left trigger while in the air, and your right and left sticks will control your right and left hands, respectively. You can grab the board at any point and move either analog stick to tweak your grab, or even do a finger-flip by moving either stick in a quarter-circle. Nail the manual will allow you to land on either the front or back wheels. To use it, you pull the right trigger and, once you've nailed the jump, you can move the stick up or down to control the angle of your manual, or left and right to steer. To ollie out of the manual, you simply let go of the right trigger. When you chain the various "nail the" modes together--with complex, huge air tricks involving multiple flips, twists, and grabs, only to finish by landing a perfect manual--you've got a pretty robust trick system that should please the more obsessive fans of the series.

 

Other new touches in the gameplay include a slightly reworked balance meter. Instead of the meter being above the player's head as in previous games, the balance meter is now integrated in the center and edges of the screen, resulting, oddly enough, in a more seamless look than before. There will also be a sim mode that will feature more realistic physics (such as jumps that aren't as high). In addition, the weather will have an effect on how your board handles, and you'll be able to have both a wet deck and a dry deck to choose from.

 

As you skate around in Proving Ground, you'll occasionally run into arcade machines strewn through the environments. The arcade spots let you can play minigames such as Hawkman, a skate-themed variation on Pac-Man that will have your skater collecting color-coded pellets throughout the environment. The different colors indicate the different "states" you need to be in to gobble up that pellet type--red pellets, for example, can only be collected when in the air, while yellow pellets can only be collected while grinding. However, in true open-ended style, you're always welcome to use your rigging skills to place rails or jumps in order to improve your chances of getting to hard-to-reach pellets on the map.

 

Speaking of rigging, the menus for building out your skatepark dreams are quite easy to use: You simply choose the object you want from the menu and place it in the environment. Once an object is placed, you can change its size with the analog sticks and, for rails, you can choose to either place them one at a time, or connect multiple rails into one continuous grind by clicking the left stick. Up to 30 pieces can be placed in the world at any given point. A new version of HORSE in the game will be tied to individual objects, with players competing for high scores on different objects placed in the map. In addition, when in multiplayer, all of the objects you create will be available for other players to check out for themselves.

 

One of the more interesting features in Proving Ground will be the new video editor, which will let you record footage from your various runs throughout the game, and then edit it to your heart's content with editing software that looks to be fairly robust. There are tons of effects and overlays you can add to your clips (many of which you'll unlock as you progress through the game) and you can place a camera practically anywhere in the environment to help capture your best tricks. You'll be able to add music to your clips, and developer Neversoft, who is also heading development on the upcoming Guitar Hero III, is using technology from the rocking rhythm game in Proving Ground in order to judge the quality of your edits. In the video editor, you'll be able to see where the beats of the tune you've selected are; the closer you cut to the beats, the higher the score you'll earn for your clip.

 

The downside to the system is that you can't rewind and save a clip on the fly. Instead, you have to manually begin recording before pulling off your best tricks. While that might detract from the spontaneity of the clips you have--inevitably, you'll have a few incredible moments that you wished you had "on tape"--with such powerful tools available, we still expect to see plenty of creative stuff coming from the Tony Hawk community once the game is released.

 

 

The skate lounge is your own personal home away from home which you can fill with items you've unlocked.

 

Your skate lounge will be a representation of all the things you've accomplished in Proving Ground. There are 10 themes to choose from for your lounge, from dance club to dojo, and you can fill up your huge space with items you've unlocked or bought with your hard-earned cash. Among the more interesting items were cars, skate ramps, and an absolutely massive plasma-screen television that looked to put most IMAX screens to shame. The video screens will play unlocked skate videos you've earned along the way; unfortunately, you won't be able to play your created videos in the player, which is a bummer. Still, once you build up enough stuff, your lounge can be a fun diversion for you to live out your skating fantasies--or invite a few buddies over for multiplayer fun and let them gawk at the items you've collected in the game.

 

With EA entering the competition with a skating game of its own this year, the competition for skateboarding supremacy has become a lot more interesting. Still, with control tweaks aplenty and enough gameplay variety to appeal to a wide range of skating approaches, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground looks like another winner in the popular franchise. According to Activision, a demo of Proving Ground will be available on Xbox Live in the near future. Stay tuned for more information on the game in the coming weeks.

[SchizoidFreud]

Tony Hawk's Proving Ground FULL OST Announced

 

Like the title says, Activision’s listed the entire soundtrack for their upcoming Tony Hawk game and it goes something like this:

 

!!! – "All My Heroes are Weirdos"

Airbourne – "Girls in Black"

Angels & Airwaves – "Secret Crowds"

Anglo Jackson – "Motorbike"

At the Gates – "Slaughter of the Soul"

Bad Brains – "Banned in DC"

Beastie Boys – "Electric Worm"

Blackalicious – "Your Move"

Bloc Party – "Version 2.0"

Cursed – "The Hands will Abide"

Cymande – "Fug"

Dag Nasty – "Circles"

Darkest Hour – "Sanctuary"

DJ JS-1 featuring L.I.F.E. Long & Immortal Technique – "Audio Technician"

El-P – "Up All Night"

Folk Implosion – "Natural One"

Foo Fighters – "The Pretender"

Fu Manchu – "We Must Obey"

Funky 4+1 – "Rappin and Rockin the House"

Future Pigeon – "Gift Tax"

Gallows – "Come Friendly Bombs"

Gorilla Biscuits – "Hold Your Ground"

Jimmy Castor Bunch – "It’s Just Begun"

Jurassic 5 – "Radio"

Kittens – "Carpenter"

Los Abandoned – "Panic-Oh!"

Lyrics Born featuring KRS-One and Evidence – "Pack Up Remix"

Maylene and the Sons of Disaster – "Memories of the Grove"

Motorcity Daredevils – "Bear in the Air"

Nation of Ulysses – "You’re My Miss Washington D.C."

Nirvana – "Breed"

Oh No feat. J. Dilla and Roc C. – "Move Part 2"

Paint it Black – "The New Brutality"

Paris – "The Devil Made Me Do It (Poach a Pig Mix)"

Percee P – "Throwback Rap Attack (Madlib remix)"

Pierce the Veil – "I’d Rather Die than Be Famous"

Pig Destroyer – "Loathsome"

Reverend Horton Heat – "Baddest of the Bad"

Revolution Mother – "Come On"

Roots Manuva – "Chin High"

Sayvinyl – "That’s Entertainment"

Silversun Pickups – "Well Thought Out Twinkles"

Slick Rick – "Children’s Story"

Smashing Pumpkins – "Tarantula"

Snapcase – "Energy Dome"

The Bled – "Starving Artiste"

The Clash – "Clash City Rockers"

The Cramps – "Garbage Man"

The Icarus Line – "Gets Paid"

The Kooks – "See the World"

The Octopus Project – "Music is Happiness"

The Rolling Stones – "Sympathy for the Devil"

The Sex Pistols – "Holidays in the Sun"

Twilight 22 – "Electric Kingdom"

[MarketTantrik]

XBLM getting Proving Ground demo today

 

 

Eager to show what they have to bring to the skating genre, Activision announced that they'll be releasing a Tony Hawk's Proving Ground demo to the XBLM Monday, September 10th. We're guessing good ole' Acti wants to prove to loyal Tony Hawk supporters that the latest installment not only lives up to its predecessors, but will eclipse them with new features like a video editor and a skate lounge. Good news for us is that there's already a skate demo on the Marketplace, so now we'll get a chance to test both skating games and award our seal approval to the best. Let the Marketplace demo war begin!

[SchizoidFreud]

whats the 'M' in XBLM?

[KnackChap]

XBLM=xbox live marketplace

[SchizoidFreud]

oh damn, my bad, thanks KC

 

btw check pm

[MightySkate]

1UP Gives 5.5/10 to Tony Hawk's Proving Ground

Tony Hawk is fun. It will always be fun. Despite the extra flourish and handful of additions we've seen since Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, the simple skating mechanics that blew everyone's minds eight years ago are what's held it all together. Through thick and thin (and through Bam Margera), whipping around ramp-laden urban environments and pulling off inhuman acrobatic feats still has its charms. Unfortunately for Tony, the same ol' fun can only get you so far; if gamers simply want straightforward entertainment, they can find it on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Store for a mere couple of bucks. For $60 and a world of possibilities, it's nice to have a little more bite, and EA gave us exactly that last month with Skate -- a fantastic sim where learning how to skate is utterly rewarding and inseparable from the experience itself. The nuts and bolts of Proving Ground still provide some fun, but at this point it's just ancient leftovers of something that used to be really special.

 

The first few hours of Proving Ground are particularly sloppy. Skating around an ugly, unimaginative city in the midst of trying to keep up with a confusing career structure isn't exactly the most convincing argument to stick with it. Why is Tony Hawk hanging out in grimy downtown Philly, giving tasks to my obnoxious character? Why aren't these subobjectives scattered everywhere explained more clearly? Wait, you mean I can build a ramp in the street? And why the hell can't I activate the Nail-the-Trick mode, the sole redeeming innovation of last year's Project 8? That last one was an especially annoying sticky point, since you have to talk to a specific character and learn how to do it, even if you know full well it's only a matter of clicking both analog sticks in. Same goes with the Nail-the-Manual and Nail-the-Grab features, which aren't too difficult to wrap your head around; if you figure out how to do them ahead of time, there shouldn't be anything stopping you from enjoying the fruits of your experimentation.

The Nail-the-_____ moves themselves are a nice touch, even if they're a bit too impractical to use in moment-to-moment gameplay. As in last year's Hawk, Nail-the-Trick slows down time when you're in the air, allowing you to control each leg individually with an analog stick to pull off lengthy streams of slo-mo stunts before you hit the ground. Nail-the-Grab allows you to use your arms instead of legs, and Nail-the-Manual swings the camera to a side view during a jump, allowing you to tilt down one set of wheels to land perfectly in a manual. If you can maintain it, you can flip out with the tap of one more button, allowing for a few more tricks before you hit the ground. As you can see, they're quite involved, and while they're gratifying to pull off and help out immensely when going for "Sick" scores, they're also too much of a hassle for when you're just looking to skate around and enjoy yourself. And as much as they help in competition, slowing down time every few seconds really kills the flow that's been oh-so-crucial to the visceral momentum of the series' gameplay.

 

Once you've played enough to unlock a full arsenal of moves, things improve noticeably, but the narrative and competitions rarely offer more than the typical Tony Hawk tomfoolery. It's got plenty to do between multiple career paths but provides little motivation to actually get any of it done. Sure, you can earn points to open up more moves or further refine the Nail features, but unlocking inherent features like this seems terribly archaic. Particularly in contrast to Skate, whose characters start out as good as they'll ever be (no stat-leveling) and simply rely on the player to get better at the game and improve his skill. And while the video editor offers far more actual editing options than Skate's, it's also embarrassingly limited since you have to choose a starting point to record beforehand (it doesn't just keep a running record of the past minute or so, like Skate does); crazy tricks and "did-you-see-that!?" moments don't just happen on cue, and having to manually start the magic completely misses the point of this type of user-created content.

 

Dropping in ramps and rails wherever you want with Rig-a-Kit is a clever idea and serves as a decent distraction from time to time, but it also shows you -- with harsh reality -- why you're not a game designer in the first place. Not that the default city is particularly well-crafted or enjoyable this time around, but it takes a huge amount of effort to place pieces that actually complement it. And while it's nice that you can create a purple-skinned skater with a green Mohawk, solid black eyes, and a scar on his face, apparently no amount of customization can stop him from being a mouthy idiot in the cut-scenes (or help him grow facial hair that doesn't look like painted straw). Online play is present, as always, with a few new interesting modes (like Wall, where you create transparent walls of color as you skate to take out other players&it's a bit like Tron's lightcycles), but this still doesn't represent a particularly engaging part of the package. The skill level still varies too much, and they have yet to find an inventive way around that.

 

Unless you've completely conquered Project 8 and are thirsting for more uninventive Tony Hawk action, Proving Ground doesn't offer any compelling reasons to give it a chance as a full-price game. It's unpolished, unfocused, and proves nothing more than the now undeniable fact that the series needs a serious makeover and a lengthy vacation. Competition is always good, but it's now more painfully evident than ever that Tony Hawk is merely an unfulfilled promise of what a skateboarding game can truly be.

:rofl2: :rofl2:

[Amay]

Haha owned

[KnackChap]

gamespot 6.5/10 both consoles

tony hawk am cry

[MarketTantrik]

For once, EA did something right. Now all we can do is watch the series go downhill as they churn out Skate 2008, 2009, 2010, ad infinitum.

[KnackChap]

tony hawks dieing ground