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Most popular sports games are photorealistic simulations now.
Success inPGA Tour 2K21is a matter of precise micro-movements, savvy club choices, and incremental gear upgrades.
Your career inNeed for Speed Heatis only as lucrative as your visits to the chop shop are plentiful.
Stadium lights reflecting off beads of sweat collected on shiny foreheads and shoulders is progress.
The road to reward is straight and narrow.
This wasnt always the case.
At the tail end of the 90s,Tony Hawks Pro Skaterrevolutionized gaming.
It didnt have rules.
The goal was to explore your surroundings and score through a series of guided point and collection challenges.
Each level is a puzzle.
Each line is a freestyle.
It finally justified all that effort and all that devotion.
At one point, we had four of the top ten best-selling video games at once.
Later entries and spinoffs hitsour noteswith reviewers for bugs and clunky peripherals that hampered gameplay.
The idea to revisit the early games came about through sheer coincidence.
Id been talking to Activision about doing a fundraiser for [the Tony Hawk Foundation], Hawk said.
In discussing it, we realized that the 20th anniversary of that first release was approaching.
It came up organically: Why dont we remaster that first game?
But remasters are a gamble.
ThePro Skaterremaster is a perfect piece of late-90s nostalgia and a necessary reset for the franchise.
It was do-it-yourself … A lot of skaters I knew were playing music.
A lot of musicians were skating.
There were definitely parallels.)
Difficulty spikes in ranked sessions and online multiplayer, where theres always a better skater breathing down your neck.
For $39.99, this is a steal.
Will there be more sequels?
I can only hope, Hawk said.
Im happy that we get to provide some kind of entertainment.