Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (Game Boy Color)

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series thrives on its ability to provide open 3D environments the player can skateboard across while figuring out the best trick lines for huge points. With a licensed soundtrack backing the arcade action, the series works wonderfully on home consoles, but to get the most out of a big release, sometimes games had companion titles on handheld systems. The Game Boy Color certainly wasn’t advanced enough to have large 3D spaces or recognizable licensed music, so plenty of concessions would have to be made to bring it to the handheld. Even after the expected changes were made though, it feels like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for Game Boy Color really just had no idea how to adapt that arcade combo-focused style of play from the console release.

The first sign of this is the half-pipe mode which is the only mode in this game that judges your tricks and grants point values based on what was done and how many times your character spun before landing. Here, you’re given a set amount of time to skateboard up and down a half-pipe, the player first needing to build up momentum before they can start pulling off tricks successfully. Once you get enough air time off the ramp, you can start pressing buttons to perform tricks. The A button alone will start spinning your character, Tony Hawk having the honor of being able to do a 900 degree spin to match his real world achievement but every other playable character settling in at a max of 720. It’s not likely you’ll be able to get in that many spins until the end though, and it’s usually smarter to focus on doing the special grab and flip tricks instead. Pressing the B or A button plus a direction will cause the skater to perform different tricks, difficult ones like a backflip worth more but it is conceivable you can slip in a few Tail Grabs or Impossibles before landing to earn about the same amount of points. So long as you land successfully the points earned from moves are locked in, but the rest of the time spent in this mode will be repeating that process, the only interruption being if you mess up a trick and need to regain speed after bailing off your board.

Half-Pipe Mode quickly grows stale and repetitive, and since there’s not much room to get creative in how you earn your points, there’s not much reason to play it. There are a few different levels that change the aesthetics of the mode, but they don’t seem to have an actual impact on the play. However, the tricks you pull off can be a bit difficult to execute since the game seemingly doesn’t like if you press the direction and button at the same time. I found it more reliable to press the direction and then the desired button to pull off tricks, but expect some stiff controls and possibly misread or completely ignored inputs if you choose to spend time in the Half-Pipe Mode.

The other two modes in the game are all done as races instead of trick competitions, with multiplayer, a tournament mode, and a one on one competition against a computer player all serving as different ways to play. Here your choice of skater will be far more important than in Half-Pipe Mode as the stats play a far stronger role due to its competitive bent. Speed, Acceleration, Brake, and Jump are all judged differently across the cast of 10 real life professional skaters, but braking is certainly something you won’t want to do since the computer players are fairly fast and only really hindered by the fact they do sometimes mess up and need time to get back on their boards. Speed and Acceleration are the real factors to be worried about, but if you pick a skater who leans too heavily into either stat you’re likely to fail. Low acceleration and high speed may feel like it will pay off in the long run, but the other skaters will be aggressive and knock you over while ignoring each other, and losing that speed will practically seal your fate. Acceleration alone won’t do you much good if your speed is low, so ultimately it’s best to pick someone middle of the road so that they can recover from the inevitable slowdowns well.

What’s odd about the cast of ten skaters though is each and every one of them is just Tony Hawk recolored. Leaving out Bob Burnquist’s trademark glasses may make sense when characters are so small and lacking in detail, but things do get a little awkward when Elissa Steamer is just a pink Tony despite being an entirely different gender. You do get to see your skater rendered in much greater detail that actually shows them properly though if you perform grab tricks during the races, but there’s a big problem with that feature. As you’re participating in the top down race where speed is key, you need to be earning points along the way to potentially make up a placement deficit. The four skaters all get a differing amount of points based on when they cross the finish line, but if you perform enough tricks and grab objects like video tapes, you might earn more points from the race than your opponents. However, every time you get sufficient air off the ample ramps placed about the courses, the tricks you do will grind the action to a halt on your screen to show a still image of your skater, the points they earned from their trick, and then resume the action right after. To get a high scoring round you’re going to want to do these almost every opportunity you can get, especially if you’re doing the tournament where your points are cumulative across multiple race courses. The constant start and stop kills the momentum of the game, but it’s too valuable not to engage with this feature.

Grinding rails and objects can earn you points as well without the interruptions, but if you’re moving fast enough to remain competitive in the race, it’s not likely you’ll be able to do the special grinds for extra points. It turns out best to hop between multiple rails to quickly steal little points before moving onto the more valuable jumps when they show up. Luckily, if you do fall off your board or are knocked off, there are speed boost items you can pick up to immediately get you back up to speed, but computer players can grab both point items and speed ups too so it’s not a unique edge you have over them. Completing a race in first will definitely do a lot to nearly guarantee you a win though, but you’ll definitely need course knowledge on your side to be able to pull it off. Some stages like the harbor are tightly packed and require constant grinding to avoid crashing into the plentiful objects, the park has a lot of split paths where figuring out the better one could benefit you, and the skate park is packed with objects meant to help you earn points for grinding and leaping off ramps. The screen scrolls upwards as you race ahead and reacting to objects as they come is rather difficult if you don’t expect them, so usually practicing the stage in the one on one mode or just doing a tournament where the results don’t matter to you are the right trick to actually having a chance. Unfortunately, it is still not unheard of for the computer players to easily outpace you unless you almost entirely avoid even small mistakes.

THE VERDICT: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for Game Boy Color chose a very poor way to adapt skateboarding into a video game form the underpowered system could actually handle. The Half-Pipe Mode is tedious and extremely boring thanks to its incredibly basic design and limited options, but the race modes at least showed a tiny glimmer of hope despite their failures. The stop and start pace of the skateboarding courses really kills the potential thrill of a high speed race, and the issues with the general racing design still sullies things even after you’ve learned the courses well enough to be competitive. You can aim for high placement or try and make up for the inevitable computer player bullying you’ll receive by performing tricks to lower the point deficit, but neither option really feels like it is testing you beyond your course knowledge and ability to press simple button combinations any time you hit a jump.

And so, I give Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater for Game Boy Color…

A TERRIBLE rating. While the racing modes aren’t as unbearably boring and plain as the Half-Pipe Mode’s all-too-straightforward concept, the skateboard races just have too much working against them to make up for their dull companion. While seeing a nice pixel art version of pro skaters as they do familiar tricks could have been a treat, the fact you see one after every aerial trick when doing such tricks are heavily incentivized constantly breaks the flow of play, and with the AI difficulty being what it is, it’s likely you won’t do well if you choose some of your favorite skaters. The idea of the race modes isn’t flawed, but the little time you have to see what’s up ahead means you either know the course well enough to succeed at grabbing items and avoiding trouble or you’ll lose the race when you bump into things or miss chances for points. Rewarding level knowledge isn’t a bad idea in a racing game of course, but Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater relies on it too much and the substitute of performing tons of tricks isn’t an engaging comeback mechanic when all the tricks are so basic.

This poor skateboarding title that bounces between repetitive and uneven depending on the mode was only the first of three attempts to adapt the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series to Game Boy Color, and already looking at the gameplay in the second it seems like much more effort was put into valuing the tricks performed and providing a closer approximation of skateboarding than what we see here. This game tries to get the vertical element with its half-pipe play but doesn’t know how to make that have any depth and attempts to adapt street skating only to turn it into a race where the factors at play are strange and can hinder or devalue actually winning the race. The development team working on this title were at a disadvantage compared to their console game counterparts, but it feels like skateboarding could have been brought to the Game Boy Color in a much better form than the half-hearted effort thrown together here.