Reviewed: November 8, 2006
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Activision

Developer
Neversoft Entertainment

Released: November 7, 2006
Genre: Sports
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Teen

9
9
9
9
9.3

Supported Features:

The game world is massive, divided into 11 distinct areas that are seamlessly integrated once you leave the map view. There were no discernable load times that I could tell, even when skating from opposite sides of the map. Several sections are locked out until you earn the right to skate there, but for the moment you start outside your house in a classic neighborhood setting with all of the expected (and a few unexpected) trick lines and icons to guide you.

There are literally hundreds and hundreds of challenges in Project 8 and almost all of them offer three variations of difficulty, Am, Pro, and Sick. These are often visually represented by colorful markers painted on the sidewalk or other parts of the level. For instance, you might spot a green marker on the curb that indicates the start of a grind trick. You start the grind and try to reach the next marker to get the Am rank. Keep going to the next marker and you get the Pro award, and if you can manage to find it and reach it, the final marker earns you the Sick ranking.

The classic Tony Hawk challenges are back, only now they are integrated right into the game world. Find the right person to talk to and these challenges will trigger, effectively sealing you into a limited area as you try to knockoff an impressive checklist of stunts and collection objectives in the standard two-minute limit. Am and Pro require certain numbers of objectives to be complete whereas Sick requires you to complete ALL challenges within the two minutes.

You can keep track of all the available challenges and events with your handy Nokia cell phone that synchs up with the on-screen navigation compass to show your available waypoints. Key people are outlined in orange and talking to them will trigger new challenges, events, or other updates that will appear on your phone.

As you rise through the ranks other people start to take notice and other pros will come to your town to challenge you. There are some pretty cool new concepts in place here. One such challenge is the Puzzle where you are required to perform a certain task – in my case I had to skate out into a parking lot, make a U-turn around a light post and return to the ledge without ever touching pavement. You are given several puzzle pieces like bars and even school busses that you must place in the overhead view to create your trick line. Then you have to do it. It’s certainly not as deep as the Create-a-Park, but it’s a fun diversion and implemented nicely.

The guys at Neversoft must be fans of 2K Sports, Amped 3 because they have borrowed two of the greatest concepts from that title. The first is crowd appreciation and your ability to impress the local bystanders with your skating skills, and the second is my personal favorite, the force bail mode where you try to see how far you can fly, how many bones you can break, and how big a hospital bill you can rack up. They even turn this into a painful bowling game.

But wait, I’ve saved the best for last. The new “Nail the Trick” mode is quite simply inspired and will have you playing and replaying small portions of the game and even the same jump over and over again. The way it works is that once you catch some air you click down on both the analog sticks to enter a focus mode. The camera zooms in to focus on the board, your feet, and your legs up to your waist. The rest of the world goes into a blur.

You now have direct control over your left and right legs and feet with the analog sticks, so pulling back on the left stick gets your foot out of the way and you can use your right foot (right analog stick) to spin and flip the board as much as you safely can before landing.

There are all sorts of subtle nuances at work here. You score more when the trucks are “up” but you can only flip the board and land when the tape is up. The game also monitors the speed and accuracy of your analog movements to determine the speed and rotation of the board, rewarding you with more points for more precise moves.

During this focus time you can also rotate your body using the LB and RB buttons, which effectively moves the camera as well. Not only does this give you big bonus points, but it also allows you to line up your next possible trick or object to continue the line.

There are dozens of locations around the world marked with a nail that indicates a “Nail the Trick” challenge, but you can also enter this focus mode and make this a part of any conventional series of tricks in a normal trick line pretty much anywhere in the game. The standard focus mode is also back and can be invoked as long as you have focus power built up in the orange meter by doing tricks.

As with any new release things have been added and others removed. Gone are graffiti tags, skitching on cars, and that obtrusive BMX bike that invaded American Wasteland. Also gone is the Create-a-Park, but with a world this large and dynamic it won't be missed. New to the game (and a long time coming if I might add) is the Quick Recover that lets you return to your board immediately after a spill with hardly any break in your momentum. But for those who are bailing on purpose, you can make use of the Y button to enhance your impact and bounce for additional broken bones and financial woes.

While you can’t actually tag the environment like you could in THAW, you will spot rival graffiti around the world. This indicates a lengthy trick line challenge that, if you can complete, will swap the existing graffiti with your own tag.

You can hop off your board and go caveman, but the designers have been careful to make sure that just about anything you need to do and any place you need to go can be reached on wheels as well as on foot – it might just take longer.

There is also a strong multiplayer component in Project 8, and the leaderboards create an addictive and competitive atmosphere almost immediately whether you are playing offline or comparing your skating skills with those around the world on Xbox Live. Just about anything that can be measured (grinds, air time, damage, etc) is recorded and ranked.

Multiplayer modes have pretty much been carried over from the past games with the exception of the new “Walls” mode, which basically turns all of your boarders into TRON light cycles as you trick around the level creating your own colored wall in hopes of trapping your opponents.

Also a first for multiplayer, you now get to explore the same massive single-player world giving you unparalleled freedom for casual skating or intense multiplayer challenges for up to eight players on Xbox Live. The only thing I would have liked to see is video replays for the top players on the leaderboard like they do in PGR3. It’s always nice to see how somebody else does a particular challenge.

The key phrase for this eighth installment of Tony Hawk is “motion capture”. In all the previous titles the artists and designers created all the skate motions and moves by hand then linked the tricks together with transitional frames. Project 8 makes use of Neversoft’s new state-of-the-art motion capture studio. Imagine a room at least 100-feet square, surrounded by 18 motion sensors. Powerful computers read location data as it is picked up from small, white, spherical sensors strategically positioned on the bodysuit and goggles of the "actor", and in this case, even the skateboard.

This data, which is accurate to within .5mm and recorded at 240fps for super slow-motion replays, can quickly be turned into realistic skeletal information and later used to animate more detailed character models with uncanny realism. Neversoft brought in 12 professional skateboarders and over a period of 60 days managed to capture some of the sweetest moves you are likely to see outside of an X-Games DVD. They even packed up their mo-cap gear and went to Tony Hawk’s private estate to capture the man himself on his own personal skateboard ramp.

This new technology is the core of an entirely rebuilt engine that allows for ultra-realistic motion in every facet of the game. Every subtle twist of the body, head movement, arm and leg position, and even the realistic bending of the board and the twisting of the trucks as you lean into turns are all perfectly recreated. Even the non-skaters wandering the streets are mo-capped.

Using the same mo-cap technology that drives the animation, the designers use these same sensors in a much closer configuration to do ultra-realistic facial animation and lip-synch on every character in the game. All of this data is then taken to the art department for the next phase.

Using full body scans and a 22 mega-pixel camera, the art department is able to capture all of the pros right down to freckles and nose hairs. Each pro was allowed to pick his own wardrobe, which was then scanned for textures, wrinkles, etc. The results are absolutely stunning.

There is also a large selection of video that shows off the talents of many of the pros featured in Project 8. Just when you start to think these crazy tricks could never be done in real-life, you can now watch them being performed, often by the people who invented the trick. And any Jason Lee fan will hurt themselves laughing when they watch his commercial for a golf instructional video.

Tony and all of the featured pros turn in adequate voice performances. It’s obvious these guys are much finer skaters than actors, but then again, the way the game is presented, you are pretty much dealing with them in real-life situations. Jason Lee is the only one who comes to the cast with any sort of fan expectations and he lives up to them in perfect style and performance.

The rest of the sound package is mostly creative ways to make your skateboard sound like it is rolling across countless surfaces. This includes grinding on pavement, picket fences, and even bamboo garden borders, which is actually quite fun and sounds like a xylophone. Perhaps the most painful effect is the breaking bones when you wipe out, either by accident or intentionally. I can just picture the Foley guy in the sound booth breaking chicken bones under a mic.

There are approximately 50 of the original motion capture sessions recreated in full 3D just waiting for you to unlock in the Bonus section of the game. You will be given full jog and camera control as you zoom, rotate, and study every precise trick these guys can pull off for the camera. You’ll easily loose a few hours in this mode watching the moves and playing director.

Achievement points are much more thought out and evenly distributed throughout both solo and online gameplay. You’ll earn a token amount of points when you unlock new areas of town, but the big points come from the more extensive objectives like scoring a million points or completing everything at the sick level.

Project 8 is going to thrash the Xbox 360 competition this holiday season and will easily be on track for sports game of the year. With a completely new physics and game engine, and totally remastered tricks and environments to meet the demands of this engine, a new era in skateboarding is born, and Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is “next-gen gaming” in its truest definition to date.