LP Beach

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland is the loose end of a trilogy with Underground 1 & 2, utilizing a similar free-roam control scheme but expanded even further and now set in the open world sandbox of Los Angeles. Where the two THUG games sat on opposite ends of the story-to-anarchy spectrum, THAW finds a nice middle-ground: your player character travels to LA to escape their crappy home and embrace the skater life, falls in with a group of skate punks, and joins them on a journey to make their secret skate park the best in LA... by wrecking and stealing other parts of LA.
While the game is baby's-first-Tony Hawk easy, the controls are some of the nicest in the franchise. Too bad everyone including your character is an aggressive douchebag.

The LP
JigglyJacob takes lead for the Story Mode, handling the game's Xbox 360 version. I (ThornBrain) join him on co-commentary and will cover the Classic Mode on the PC version at the end of the LP.

The Music
To avoid issues with copyright bots and the like, the game's usual soundtrack has been muted and replaced with Tony Hawk-appropriate music from myself and several musician friends. Ignore that I'm not from LA and they're not even from California.
Music by: ThornBrain | Big Time Kill | smell | Fatigue | Gramlins | Sawtooth

What About THUG2?
Both Jacob and I had massive recording issues with it, so we're skipping it for now. We'll try again after THAW.

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A story where everyone is a huge jerk sounds entertaining, at least. Especially if it involves smacking people over the head with skateboards
I appreciated the discussion at the end about these games' more problematic elements, by the way! Sounds plausible that those elements are mostly a symptom of that dark era that was early-21st-century edgelord culture...

Getting points for hitting someone with a skateboard? All those concerned parents must have confused this game for GTA.

All of my best friends screamed in my face when we first met too.

Part of me still genuinely enjoys "Everyone's an asshole to everyone" character writing. It completely falls apart if even one character isn't in on it but as long as you can keep that right it can be dumb fun.

I wonder if they were going for "tosser" but wanted to punk it up with "hucker."

I can't say I believe you can destroy so much of LA and not immediately get the cops on you. Now, Oakland...

So, do skate parks usually have deadly spike pits?

It's called American Wasteland because it actually takes place in the Mad Max universe.

I don't feel very zen after this, gotta say

That's one radical construction worker at the start.

Anyways like I said, Mad Max universe! The first movie that is, before everything turned into desert. Roving gangs, lone wolf acts of extreme violence, advancement via (attempted) assassination.

Iggy goes *pop*

Skate club reminded me of a bad version of the lifting Gorons from Breath of the Wild. Just a bunch of shirtless dudes standing around pumping iron riding skateboards.

A bert slide down a road sure looks like what I did whenever I got on a skateboard, maybe I was actually good! (No I wasn't)

Ah, so the title means that LA will be a smouldering wasteland when Tiddy is done with it.

I wonder how much input the skate stars had on their portrayal in these games. Well, aside from the obvious circumstance of playing second fiddle to Tony Hawk.

Not the most yikes guy in the game, but it sure tracks with the rest of it

Whole new meaning of union busting happening on that oil rig.

Tony Kawfka's American Wasteman

You know it occurs to me that ours heroes in these games never save themselves. If they didn't manage to run into every single famous skater in the US on a single day they'd never accomplish anything.

Time for a conveyor belt of pros to make their contractual appearances

Bam's lines sounds like they were recorded over the phone plus some serious jackass energy with the shopping cart.

Final part of the story mode, which is really more of a victory lap on the corpse of a casino. Next week, the final part of the whole LP: Classic Mode!

I suppose they're trying to recapture the crazy level geometry of the Pro Skater games in the skate park but honestly the casino level did that far better. A few slot machine spewing coins everywhere, crash through the glass floor of a pool, grind around a roulette wheel to send a comically oversized ball through a wall to open up a secret area and there you go.

They just had to get that last-minute romance in, huh?

Anyway, Tony Hawk is still on it from time to time
https://twitter.com/tonyhawk/status/1354305117982400514

Diggadeewhafoowow

That's all for THAW, so look forward to us finally beginning Underground 2 next week!