Sometimes Sequels Do Succeed

This was a personal childhood favorite. The game was fun, in depth, and time consuming, but it was worth the time spent. It’s the famous multi-platform game, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2.

This game had everything. Tony Hawk before he was a 45 year old man still trying to skate, awesome levels, an amazing soundtrack, and great physics which is the hardest part to get right for sports games, especially for skating. There was just so much packed into such a little cartridge.

There’s a lot to choose from when it comes to game modes. A simplified career mode, two player, which had two great game modes as a subcategory, free skate, and perhaps the best game mode, custom skate parks, where you could build and skate on insanely fun or insanely wacky levels. Inside the game modes, you can choose from a plethora of skaters, all with unique traits, boards, clothing, and skill sets. The beauty of this game, everytime you hit the select button, there was just more customization and more options to choose from.

The gameplay was great too. I play this game still, and to this day I’m still learning new tricks, and still learning of new places to test them out. Not only were the tricks deep, but there were other little places where you could do tricks, but not the kind that require button mashing or memorization. Rather, tricks such as trying to land a deep drop after a large ramp, clearing huge gaps, or sliding on certain things that would break or unlock more places to skate.

The soundtrack however, is what keeps you playing for hours. As if the game wasn’t just fun, you kept skating to music. It was “so 90s” of us to skate to such rebellious, yet incredibly good music. I still find myself going back just to listen to certain songs.

This game had everything, and if you think I’m lying, there’s a reason this game is rated the 25th best of all time (as of December 2012 and according to GameRankings). It was a huge success, and a huge front for all skating games to come out afterwards. No disrespect to the first game, but this game single handedly can be used as an argument for why sequels sometimes can succeed, and sometimes steal the show from the original. It also shows graphics sometimes can be almost pointless in how good a game can truly be. If a game with graphics like this is a top 25 game of all time, you may wanna rethink passing on some classics due to poor graphics.

Hidden Gems

We all grew up on this movie series. And 99% of the time, movie video games suck. And that’s a generous percentage. However, this game, for some reason is just so fun to play, even if some anal game reviewing sites don’t think so.

I’m talking about Toy Story 2 for the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Dreamcast, . I haven’t met many people who have played it, and when I looked up reviews, generally it was average. However, I have as much fun playing the game now, as when I did when I grew up with it. You take control of the awesome Buzz Lightyear, and just like the movie, you have to find and save Woody from Big Al. In order to do so, you have to collect Pizza Planet Tokens, and each level has at least 5, and collecting certain tokens causes you to unlock some pretty interesting items.

There’s many reasons to like this game, as long as you have a heart or some kind of decent childhood. The same music from the movie appears in this game, and it just gives you a nice heart-warming feeling to hear one more time. All our favorite characters make an appearance on almost every level, with an occasional surprise guest sometimes.

Now you would think the game play would suck, I’m just so high on this game because of the atmosphere right? Wrong. The game play necessarily mechanically wise, graphically wise, and physically wise I will admit is not the best. But it isn’t so bad where it is unplayable, and for the Nintendo 64, the graphics are duable. It’s the wide variety of missions and goals that keep you intrigued.

Each level there’s a race with RC, which was always a nice little random mission, and past the first level is extremely difficult without power ups. Then you have the unique boss for each level, which are all difficult, with the exception of the first one of course. Then you have a “collect coins” for Hamm every level which can be fun because of the random spots of the coins.

It also has a collect 5 things mission unique to each level, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. Lastly, there is always something random. For example, on the level Andy’s Neighborhood, you have to randomly blow up a rubber duck pool floaty and then jump on it as hard as possible to jump up to a token.

When you beat this game, you feel so accomplished, even more so then the first time when you see the heart-felt ending to the actual movie. I’ll even go as far to say, not only is this my hidden gem, I also will go out to say, personally, and I could also argue this if I really wanted to, that this is the best movie converted game out there.

The childish tasks, comforting atmosphere, and my personal bias towards Toy Story that makes this game to me feel like a hidden gem.