You know you have a serious problem when you suddenly have the urge to do a handplant on your office desk or grind the railing at the local mall. Be forewarned — that's the spell this game will cast on you. One of the bestselling PlayStation games of all time, Aspyr's port of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is so incredibly fun — not to mention addictive and consuming — that it will have you seeing, hearing, and dreaming about perfecting your technique for grinds, ollies, and nosegrabs for more hours in a day than any psychologist would deem healthy...
You play 1 of 13 skaters attempting to skate through eight challenging levels situated in various skate-park venues around the world, including Marseille, France; Venice Beach, California; and New York. Each level contains a series of widely varied goals; their degree of difficulty dictates how much money you'll get upon completion. Earn enough money and you advance to a new level.
Two of the levels are medal rounds rather than goal levels. For these rounds, you compete in three a-minute heats, rated by a panel of computer judges — your best two heats count, but you must place among the top three competitors to receive money and advance to the next level. Think the judges scored your mad skillz unfairly? Tough luck. Try again — and quit your whining.
The goals involve a series of tasks, such as collecting five of the same item (you must collective hall passes in the California schoolyard, for example); performing a cool trick like 50-50ing a sculpture (that's skater lingo fora type of grind, dude); or completing some bizarre feat, like ollieinga Venice Beach bum who magically appears and disappears. Some goals involve free skating, where you earn money for reaching a certain score. The more tricks you perform in combination, the higher your score. Perhaps the coolest thing about the game is that you can interact with almost any object in a level — you can grind street curbs, carp lant taxi cabs, and even ride along walls.
Pro Skater 2 can really test one's coolsome of the goals can take tens if not hundreds of tries to pull off. To do the truly special tricks, you must upgrade your stats and arsenal of tricks. Each skater has a set of strengths and weaknesses. To improve these stats you need to perfect certain feats, such as landing, catching air, or spinning, and complete some of the harder challenges.
You can also buy new tricks To finish the game, you must complete every goal in all of the levels — a difficult challenge that practically requires you to quit your job and make playing this game your full-time career (not that we advocate that). After finishing the game, you can have still more fun — just switch to another skater or build your own skate park...
Except for a few clipping and redrawing problems leftover from the game’s PlayStation roots, the graphics are solid and look pretty cool. Each level has its own feel — from the graffiti walls of Venice Beach to the dark streets of New York to the fountains and parks of Philadelphia. Unfortunately, because of the port, a few console-based annoyances exist. For example, you can’t type in your name using the keyboard when you want to save a game — instead, you have to maneuver the cursor to the correct letter onscreen.
Also, the music (15 tracks in all), which blasts in an endless loop, can be annoying. An included Mac OS X version runs fine, but until that system offers support for Apple’s InputSprockets, you can’t use a gamepad to play (our preferred method).
That said, Tony Hawk 2 is a fantastic game that will have you high on adrenaline one minute and more frustrated than a teenage boy going through puberty the next. Whether it leaves you feeling triumphant or battered, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 will keep you coming back for more.
Lu, Cathy. (September 2001). Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. MacAddict. (pgs. 54-55).
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2
Neversoft
Games
out of 10 (8 votes)
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2015-03-31 / 
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thps2_macintosh.zip
