Pro Skater 4 has nine giant levels, taking you on a globe-hopping journey from Alcatraz Prison to Trafalgar Square. Eventually, you’ll be able to talk to enough people and complete enough Jackass-style outrageously fun missions to progress to the next level. This is true, intuitive, gaming that respects the player’s abilities. Within 4 minutes of your PlayStation 2 lighting up, you’re performing inhuman acrobatic stunts and learning the intricacies and subtleties of the controls with no tutorials or practice sessions. This multifaceted stage operates on three levels: the grimy depths of the sewer system acting as a series of half-pipes, the streets and bridges of the campus allowing you to practice stringing together combos, and the tops of the various lecture halls and humanities buildings acting as perilous platforms for death-defying feats of skateboard wizardry. A large, colourful map that allows you to grind the tops of high rails, skitch on the back of a speeding car, plummet across the sky on a high wire and even play a game of tennis with a skateboard for a racket, College becomes a virtual home within seconds.
The first level, College, is quite possibly the greatest first level of any video game. This is true, intuitive, gaming that respects the player’s abilities Sometimes we just want immediate freedom to explore and experiment free from rules and walls. Lengthy, hand-holding tutorials and 30-minute long introductory cutscenes are an annoyingly persistent video game pest. There are far too many video games that don’t let you have fun right away. Whereas the earlier games in the Pro Skater series imposed an arbitrary two-minute time limit for claustrophobically small environments, the glorious fourth entry jettisoned the time limit and boosted the size of the levels, giving you interactive worlds to explore and master at your leisure. Complete enough of these goals and you advance to the next level. You skate through expansive environments, picking up goals when it suits you. The unadulterated rush of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 comes from its fantastic mix of arcade-style immediacy and total freedom. An uncomplicated, no-fuss, unpretentious game that accounts for about 70% of the positive memories of my childhood (and that’s a conservative estimate). I’ve written in the past about my love of narrative media and the video games that challenge its conventions, but this game is something else entirely. These sounds are as nostalgic to me as much as Fall Out Boy’s better albums, Christopher Eccleston piloting the TARDIS, and my mom’s apple crumble with custard. The sharp cracking sound of a perfectly executed kickflip. The low rumble of a skateboard’s wheels on concrete.
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