Damn it Feels Good to be a THUG - Let's Play Tony Hawk's Underground!

Put your Let's Plays in here.
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The Tony Hawk's Pro Skater gaming franchise, much like Tony himself, did much to popularize skateboarding with its approachable, anarchic, arcadey take on the sport. But in 2003, developer Neversoft were feeling ambitious. The previous game, Pro Skater 4, was the first to feature an open level structure and individual missions given by NPCs. The next level from that? Put in an actual story. And wouldn't you know it, it's actually pretty good.

Tony Hawk's Underground is the first narrative-driven game in the franchise, following the journey of your created player character from New Jersey nobody to famous pro skater, with several actual pros popping in to provide some color, all anchored by one of gaming's most vile antagonists...
And also you can get off the board and run around and climb around and my god is it a useful safety net. Still pretty jank game though.

The LP
This is a straightforward run through the game on Sick difficulty. I won't be doing all of the missions since some of them are just insurmountable on Sick, but I will be getting all of the secret tapes, levels, etc at the end of the LP.
I'm joined on co-commentary by JigglyJacob, a fellow old fan of the Tony Hawk games, and he's more recently taken up skateboarding himself in real life, so he may have additional insights that I may not. Our player character, Tiddy, also originates from his WarioWare LPs, which are highly recommended viewing: [Smooth Moves|Gold]

Spoiler Policy
While the game was pretty popular in its time, there's probably plenty of people here who haven't played it and don't know the story, so avoid discussing or hinting at events that haven't happened in the LP yet.

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Last edited by ThornBrain on Mon Nov 23, 2020 8:03 pm, edited 7 times in total.

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The Jersey boys break New York. And probably a limb or two. That van's not far behind.

It's hard to think of games that have aged more poorly than some of the post-numbers Tony Hawk games.

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Time to prove ourselves in our first amateur competition! Except...

Also, Jacob takes us on a tour of the Tampa landmarks in the level!

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Oh no, a rivalry!

I feel like there's always only 1 explanation as to why a strip club based on a real strip club gets put into a game though :ssh:

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I graduated from college, but that was six years ago, and I've barely used my degree for anything. Might as well get a top-up.

I'm admittedly not terribly interested in the game itself, but I think I'll just watch this for the cutscenes.
Congrats to Chad Muska for being pretty much the metaphysical embodiment of his own name.

Vancouver, eh? Guess I need to keep on eye out for the landmarks and strip clubs from around here.

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Hey, this is perfectly safe in a world with no consequences!

...I hate that I'm agreeing with Eric on anything, but in any world where human bodies are slightly less indestructible, Tiddy would absolutely get himself killed within a year. He wouldn't even reach the ripe age of 2.

BC Courts is definitely a good location to have some video game skating. Lots of sharp corners and edges.

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Crap, I left my surprise at home.

What a (mc)twist.

Didn't see much of interest in that map for Vancouver. Big landmarks in and around the arena of course, too bad about those lo-rez mountains.

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Crap, I left my spare surprise in Vancouver.

If this game was set during the Cold War, Tiddy would've just single-handedly caused World War III about five times in less than a day.

Looking forward to the long-awaited beatdown :toot:

I don't think I can name a single game where the green nightvision ever made things easier.

Come to think of it how would Eric ever steal the footage, its not like these are similar looking boys.

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It wasn't made totally clear, but Eric didn't doctor the footage; he just deleted ours and used his own.

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Time for Tiddy to get his name and fame back. And that missing tape...

Next week, the LP finale and all the secrets!

That has to be one of the best rewards for beating the highest difficulty that I've ever seen :allears:

Nothing says "I just want to skate man" like a video featuring some of the most famous skaters in the world. Anyways bit of a weird final mission on the lower difficulties because its not like you're actually beating him. Just the punch works out much better.

Also damn it game if you're going to just make up your own trick for the helicopter video having the skater tap one of the helicopter blades (with the skateboard!) on the way down was right there.

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THUG is complete! Look forward to American Wasteland next week, with Jacob taking over for the story, though I will do Classic Mode when we get around to that.

Part of me misses the 2 minute Puzzle Box of the 1-3 Pro Skater games' career mode but at least some of that is probably nostalgia. Also speaking of iconic soundtracks I know there was free mode but considering the 2 minute timer in the mode of how you advance the game its at least somewhat weird that the soundtracks got iconic because I'm not sure any of the songs were short enough to hear the whole thing in 2 minutes! Maybe Blitzkrieg Bop? Older me wonders if that was a way to reduce licensing costs.

Anyways, these games completely passed me by after 4 so its great to have seen this and I look forward to the rest.

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For those who haven't seen it, we've begun American Wasteland next!
(We're skipping Underground 2 for now due to recording issues. We'll try again after THAW.)

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