Like anyone else, I have a handful of games that I know better than any others. These are the games whose layouts and core mechanics are moreso imprinted upon me than recalled when I go back to them, whose details are stored in the figurative spinal fluid rather than in the figurative back of the brain, the ones I crawl back to in times of uncertainty and play through in sessions closer to therapy and self-actualization than fun. Each echo sentiments from different ages, be they from the first encounter or from repeat plays – Every subsequent trip to Whomp’s Fortress re-sparks the feelings of Christmas Day 2000, each excursion into the Marble Gallery of Dracula’s Castle has me back in the staff cabins at Camp Naish exploring Symphony of the Night with my friends as a teenager, every jump on the Port Carverton spillway evoking the joy of a new game unwrapped on the first weekend of summer vacation after sophomore year.
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 is the standout among standouts here. There is no game I know like that one. There are few, maybe no, works of any medium that I know so well, to which I’ve returned so often over such a span of time – April 26th, 2002, over 21 years ago, was when I first became acquainted with it, and it’s had a presence in some form ever since, be it the original Gamecube copy or those on other platforms that I’ve picked up from bargain bins and thrift stores along the way. I suspect I’ve put weeks into it in total, grinded the high-wires up to the funnel atop the Cruise Ship to collect the final secret tape thousands of times, and I still tend to watch the credit video to its end. I know it like I knew my childhood home and my 2003 Buick Le Sabre, but unlike both of them, I can still return to THPS3.
Those memories are, however, limited to that original version (for the sake of this piece, we’ll call it, the one released for PC, PlayStation 2, XBOX, and Gamecube, the Prime version). I have built up next-to-no experience with Shaba Games’ prior-generation port in these past 21 years. My friend Billy, who lived on the opposite side of the parking lot of the public pool from me growing up, had that version well before I had mine, so I had my first glimpses of the game’s levels while waiting to take turns on the controller at his house in early 2002. I think I rented the N64 version out of curiosity at a Blockbuster at some point, too. I think of it primarily as the source of an alternative version of Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” chopped-down to fit within the space of a N64 cartridge, one that’s become known as “And Don’t Forget The Joker” for the priority it places on repeating that otherwise fairly insignificant part of the original song. Otherwise, before last week, I had surprisingly limited direct experience with it considering not only that, first, it’s a step-down port of one of my favorite games, second, I’m interested in that era of weird step-down ports from PS2 to PS1, and third, I’d spent significant time with both the Game Boy Color and Advance ports of the game during my youth, so it’s not as if I couldn’t have ever touched a non-Prime port.
Yet, there I was, spurred on at random on a free Sunday evening to try out the PS1 port.
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