News

Intro

Back in its day, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was the very first time that players could skate on-line in the series - even on console. Alongside that came 60 FPS gameplay and a new engine powered in part by RenderWare, plus the Revert. It was nice.

The sequel THPS4 then went on to get rid of the traditional 2 minute timer, padding out the gameplay with an increased number of goals you can take at your own pace - plus the Spine-Transfer. It was also the first step into building a semi-immersive skating game that they would ‘flesh out’ later with Tony Hawk’s Underground.

In those days, they’d publish a new title in this series every year.
Now, over 2 decades after the release of the original games comes a remake - following in the footsteps of another.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is the direct sequel to Vicarious Visions their game slash remake Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2. The latter only got about a month worth of updates, after which Vicarious was pronounced dead when the studio got merged with the rest of Blizzard. Microsoft then acquired Activision/Blizzard after years of fighting regulators. Five years have passed and what was once-upon-a-time planned as DLC for 1 + 2 turned into a standalone game.

We’ll cut to the point: This is a pretty good remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. Largely in thanks to what Vicarious Visions already did. The core gameplay is the same. The bits related to part 4 aren’t remaking much, besides the actual levels themselves.

We paid good cash for a copy of this game to fall into our lap early. Nothing here was sponsored by ANYBODY! We’re writing this because we want to - and by hand no less! So we’ll go over our observations. We won’t find us talking about the soundtrack and other subjective things much.

All the pictures are also taken by us, they’re not always related to what’s being written.

The Innovations

Iron Galaxy took some risks by building original levels to replace some omitted ones. If their new levels don’t work alongside the rest, they will stick out. That said what they delivered is quite good for what it is. They’re definitely better than what they’re replacing (Chicago and Carnival). People will make up their own mind, find exploits or find other positive traits in these, but these are our initial impressions after our first playthrough of the game:

The Water Park level comes close to something you might find in THUG2 or American Wasteland, but there aren’t many easily definable points of interest around the lower sections. It also features a scuffed imitation of Eric Sparrow we refuse to show. There’s a lot of places to go though and lots of potential lines.

The Movie Set level is a an average competition level. It’s got a few issues.

The Pinball Level is a lovely extra with some fun interactive goals to complete.

Also new are the cutscenes which in the case of the levels from part 4 give you some moments from the original campaign. They pause player movement and skate timer when they happen.

We also gain the ability to place goals in Create-A-Park. There’s also more variety in the backgrounds offered, but the park complexity limit is the same as 1+2. Still, very welcome changes and overall great improvements. The parks still have the same fidelity to them as before, but that is fine. There’s still decent looking ones out there, alongside the fun and scuffy ones.

The multiplayer game has a new HAWK mode where your skater drops letter pickups for others to find. It’s cute, and tempting to go back to because it allows you be ‘creative’ in a different way. The new and included voice chat is also good to have.

Photo Mode, is also a thing. It works, does what it should. We’ve been using it for the screenshots alongside this review. More on that feature later.

The UI and presentation looks nice and does a good job capturing the memories of part 3.

The Weaknesses

What (Most Likely) Won’t Be Fixed

Since its unveiling, people have been divided over the omittiance of the career mode that the original part 4 had. Instead, the levels from part 4 play just like part 3. This is a deal breaker if you care about authenticity to the source material of course. We feel conflicted.
It’s hard to not argue that the series peaked at part 3.
But… a lot of goals are also lost, that make up quite a bit of content. A whole goal level like Kona got turned into a competition-only level for consistency with the level layouts of the previous games.
It’s difficult to still call that a remake, but if we’d had a slower version of part 4, with all the skate pros doing their best voicing their lines for the goals - would the non-fans rejoice over this change? When THPS 1+2 was doing so well as was being hailed as the definitive Tony game, would you really want to risk changing anything?
Rough.

While the Create-A-Skater apparel selection seems fine, it’s not as expanded as they made it sound like it was? The selection also shares little resemblence with the original games. It might be a different experience if they merged it together with the content from THPS 1 + 2? Then again, some content is also very familar and inherited from 1 + 2. Really makes you wish this was DLC.

Regarding Multiplayer - unlike THPS 1 + 2 you will need to create/login to an Activison Online account. It makes up for it by allowing for cross-play with non-PC platforms though. However, it is worth pointing out the change and some will be turned off by it and its implementation.

As for the new levels, only Waterpark is one that I feel really enthusiastic about in multiplayer Free Skate. The Movie Set environment doesn’t seem to be doing it for me in that department. It just doesn’t have ‘skate spots’ for that sorta thing.

Lobbies you can preview, so you can pick a session to join instead of being thrown into whatever their backend decides to throw you in. Sometimes you want to avoid a specific playlist or person. There’s just such a lack of control and transparency there.

Things They Can Add To Make Up For It

That said, there’s lots of other things players have requested since THPS 1 + 2 that Iron Galaxy can still put in. Hopefully their overlords will let them do something to make a few things right with the fans. Addressing any of these would go a long way.

These Have Been Requested Long Before Release

Unlike part 4 there is also no Set Custom Restart Point option. It’d be nice to see that patched in. Please add Set Custom Restart Point so people can practice lines on these bigger maps. This is especially is a must for the bigger levels like Los Angeles or Shipyard.

There’s also no text chat of any kind. They’re probably keeping it simple for themselves because of cross-play but it’s something the players need and want on PC if they don’t have access to voice.

There’s no spectating. We want to watch others do lines too, you know!

Improvements To New Additions

The Movie Studio level has some questionable collision on one of the light-cranes you can grind downstairs, the one side facing a vert ramp. It’s pretty difficult to miss.

The Photo Mode lacks depth-of-field, and a per-object motion-blur options. One could produce much better photos with access to those. The brightness/exposure settings aren’t enough to fix photos that have ‘potential’ are falling just short due to the composition being flat.

There’s no Replay mode. Photo Mode feels weird without this. I very much miss being able to save replays of sessions from the original games and It wouldn’t take much to record a single session into computer memory. Being forced to pause the game while you’re doing crazy lines tends to throw you off afterwards when switching into Photo Mode, and there’s already lots of moments I missed that I wish I could have captured.

On Steam Deck - Worth It?

Yes. It works out of the box, with the default Proton tool selection. The performance using the default quality settings is balanced. The game has initial hiccups in large, open levels like Waterpark and London, but things seem to smooth out when skating for a bit.

Using the on screen keyboard to sign up for multiplayer was clunky, but doable.

The only major issue has to do with the built-in Steam Deck controls. Hook up a controller via Bluetooth, or plug something in via USB. The form factor isn’t the greatest for this type of gameplay in our opinion, but you may have the magic hands.

On a full battery charge, you get about 3.5 hours worth of gameplay.

The Verdict

The verdict is this: If you loved Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2, you’ll want this one. If you expected more than what the previous game had to offer, you won’t find much aside from extras for the creative players. Improved Create-A-Park and the introduction of a Photo Mode are very much worth noting. Some players will get lost in either of those, thanks to their additions.

This is quite literally a modern remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3… plus levels from 4. It’s missing a lot of content from 4 that got lost in the conversion process to the 2 minute timer format. That said, what is there is good. The level remakes are all solid, and ultimately improve them.

And in terms of the price, it’s not exactly competing with the rest of the AAA titles either. You get a pretty good remake of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3. That counts for something… right?

The risks Iron Galaxy took are in their contributions to the level pool, which makes sense.
If players want more of these types of games, someone will have to be able to create new stuff going forward.

That’s the idea, right? Now what will the future of Tony Hawk’s videogame emporium look like? More remakes? Something new?

We know Tony is supposedly fighting hard to get Underground remade. Will that happen? We do not yet know. But it’s unlikely they they will try to streamline that game, now that would be nefarious.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 is available on Steam, starting today.

Playback.dem

It’s that time of the month again! Where you can read about hot stuff in our corner of PC Gaming and where we seemingly predict the future.

Site News

New Game Pages

New game pages have been added! We’re joined by Test Drive Unlimited and GTR 2, two legendary racing games that have stood the test of time.

Review Incoming

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is here. We’ve been playing it and you will get a review in 2 days. Sorry the rest of the playback is so short.

Game News

Flash Games Archive News

As reported by Boing Boing the people of the world now can enjoy the Flashpoint Archive! Over 200k flash games have supposedly been preserved already. Time to re-run Stick RPG, that one Bumper Car game or those old Yeti Sports game hacks.

reTHAWed v4.3.1 goes POSTAL

RWS likes to collab these days, so here comes the new reTHAWed update which doesn’t just bring new classic levels and tweaks into the mod, but also adds new skaters based on models featured in POSTAL 2. Yes, you can even skate as the dog “Champ”.

Check out the announcement trailer on YouTube, our the release trailer on YouTube.

Marathon Delays September Date

Bungie has delayed Marathon away from its original September 23rd release date. This means you have more time to replay Marathon 1, then Maraton 2 and Marathon Infinity before that launches.

The new Marathon will be launching on Steam, sometime in the future.

Tech News

Warner Bros. Studios Restructure

Restructuring has taken place at Warner Bros. gaming division who is known for having recently beheaded Monolith Productions. Their roadmap is this: please fans of successful existing properties. This means they’ll be focusing solely on Mortal Kombat alongside non-gaming related franchises in their gaming studios.

Speaking of which, they already have a Trailer out for Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection which Digital Eclipse is developing. That is looking sweet. I still have the old collection developed by Code Mystics, but GFWL went AWOL.

Steam Enables SteamPlay By Default

As reported by GamingOnLinux - which has also turned 16 years old recently - Valve has now made it so any Windows game can be installed now without having to tick an extra check box.

Game compatibility very high these days, with only games using third-party anti-cheat solutions causing problems on the regular. They also collect usage metrics and probably determined that first thing people will do is interact with the switch, too.

Discord Stabs BotGhost

For 7.5 years the people at BotGhost had been serving the users of Discord, and made a nice living doing it too, until now.

There was much outcry, and people complained about how Discord is getting worse, once again. Most of that discourse was of course, on Discord.

Users have also noticed that perhaps a bit too much data was sent out to BotGhost. Oh, what could possibly happen if someone I don’t know has access to my data?!

Please, someone tell them about the third-party doctrine so they can all stop recommending worse options.

If you care about privacy and your rights, you self-host. If you too want to avoid getting burned over and over again, consider reading Chapter 6 of “Unix Without Words”: obtaining and maintaining a personal UNIX guru.

Xbox Handheld Revealed

Yes, the ROG Xbox Ally has been on our mind for a while. We actually have an Xbox Series X at frag-net.com’s beach house, and have quite the fondness for the original Xbox library of games. So what did we expect from a properly branded ‘Xbox’ handheld? A first-class Xbox, however this thing will ship with Windows 11 Home.

The device has not yet launched, so we don’t have a verdict yet at all.

You have the opportunity to create a polished experience with the Xbox library, make a solid device that stands on its own and doesn’t deal with that desktop jank. But instead they’re choosing to compete against the Steam Deck. Fair enough.

If you’re going to do this, listen to the complaints players have about the Deck. Expectations are high. But there’s also problems worth solving. We’re looking forward to the launch of these portables.

But this is a perfect opportunity to address issues not exclusive to the ROG Xbox Ally.

On Valve their Steam Deck with its native SteamOS, players will encounter the occasional jank with trying to force a PC game into being portable and controller oriented. That is by far the largest turn-off for anyone who has been hesistant to get one. There also aren’t any great solutions to it.

And although very rarely do you run into games that don’t work at all, it can happen. This is also not exclusive to Linux or playing via Wine/Proton - not all games were written with the hindsight of modern hardware performance. Then there’s also games that just don’t work on that form factor.

We believe that a more polished experience would be very successful.

It’s Over

That’s it! Shoo! Now go play something, or do something useful! We are back to playing THPS 3+4 to bring you our review, soon.

Playback.dem

This was May 2025 in a nutshell.

Site Updates

• Data oriented redesign. Most bits of information from games came from a single sheet of HTML - now the individual header categories are dynamically put together from multiple sources of data.
• We have started adding notes to certain games. Like on the page for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, you can read bits specific to the PC version. It’s like trivia, but often more technical.

Game News

Giant Bomb Goes Independent

This was quite a saga. We’ve watched the transition of ownership of the legendary videogame site Giant Bomb a few times.

It was previously owned by Fandom, but had now found independence. After fans and staff made it clear that recent changes at companies run by Fandom would effectively kill the site, the people in charge were kind enough to sell the business.

This means that no one is funding Giant Bomb now, except for people like us.

They have a vault of great video content, including some high quality game tape rips. If you sign up for Giant Bomb Premium you’re allowed to download it all too.

R1Delta released

Sales of Titanfall were halted back in 2021, leaving the game abandoned by its developer and publisher. While some of the infrastructure is still up, no one is really playing due to the threats constantly ruining the game.

Now, there’s an answer to your worries - and that is R1Delta. With its full guts on display over on GitHub it promises an open source, custom server framework for Titanfall. It allows you to host dedicated servers and modded servers as well. You can even view a list of games active at any given time.

Great work on preserving one kickass multiplayer game. Our hats off to our friends at R1Delta.

Overturn Network Test

As reported earlier, a playtest event took place that tested the network performance of Overturn. We were debugging some network anomalies where also seeing how the elaborate entity work performed over the network. You can also still download and play Overturn: Operation Deathmatch Test and see what all the fuss was about.

One of the maps had lots of visual effects, like beam type entities (and lightstyle color switches) for the King of the Hill mode that we were worried about might be heavy on the networking. We had some issues with client-side state/prediction misses, but nothing that detracted from the fun. We thank everyone again for their participation - and I have word from the core development team at Bloodbath Software that an update will be out this June (or July, at the latest). As there’s lots of things going on in the industry this time of the year, some of our staff will be extraordinarily busy too.

Valve Stops Counter-Strike: Classic Offensive

After years of waiting, the Classic Offensive mod for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive had announced that their project is not allowed to be distributed. Watch the video by ESCalation for the direct source.

Valve was blocking them from releasing it, unless they rebase it on top of Counter-Strike 2 or on top of the older (but still supported) Source Base 2013. On a technical level this was understandable because the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive branch was no longer being maintained and thus no longer receives security updates. Valve would only make themselves more work by endorsing it in the long run by letting them use it.

Unfortunately, when you agree to the SDK license agreement put forth by Valve you are at their mercy. Maybe we’ll see a port to Counter-Strike 2, but it seems morale had hit rock bottom. We are hoping for an eventual happy ending to this saga.

You can see the credits and development timeline here.

The Tekken Waffle House Saga

Waffle House has been ghosting Tekken 8 lead Katsuhiro Harada. Fans of the franchise want to be able to fight inside a Waffle House franchise but they won’t seem to get it.

IGN reports this passionate cry for a cross over.

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That is it for our AAA game industry coverage for the month.

The Golden Parrot: Against All Flags v2.2 released

Probably one of the most creative modifications for Wolfenstein 3D is made by fraggeur and it’s titled The Golded Parrot: Against All Flags. This sequel to The Golden Parrot continues the mix of of action and role-playing game.

With an all new episode in this update, you’ll find plenty to plunder on this adventure. Even if you’ve played an older version, you might want to replay it with the newly added skills.

Read the release announcement on ModDB.

Holocron Challenges v2.0 released

Love duels? Love Star Wars? The PvE mod Holocron Challenges for Jedi Academy adds a new game type for you duel/tournament lovers:

Masters of Tera Kasi

Fight 8 enemies across 8 stages in this ladder mode, before meeting a boss character you need to fight. Every time you play it’s different, as it’s all randomized.

Basically, if you crave variety and want something you can pick up and play? Look no further than this mod by Plasma89. No need to choose a map every time, this mod just picks some variety for you.

Half-Life Dreamcast Manual, Correcting Misinformation

The SEGA Dreamcast Info site by Comby Laurent had posted a full scan of the manual of the cancelled Half-Life on Dreamcast as well as inserts for the case from an authentic copy.

Staff of Frag-Net preserved the authentic Half-Life Dreamcast box many years ago already. Combined, we are all able to see what Half-Life Dreamcast would have been like on our game shelves.

Another rumor and bit of misinformation was being put to rest, and we could now confirm that the original scene release of Half-Life on Dreamcast was not modified.

HRPG v3.0 released

This is Heretic but with more RPG elements! With adjusting monster spawns, new classes and powerups this is a fresh new way to experience Heretic on GZDoom. Made by ThePunKing.

Download for v3.0 on ModDB

Tiberium Resonance v0.2 released

This mod by Nozuki_Guardian17 is an attempt to remake Command & Conquer 4 on top of Command & Conquer 3. You will also need the expansion pack Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath in order to play this mod. Grab the latest full version on ModDB.

You should definitely also check Tiberium Chaos if you’re into some chaotic, unbalanced, feature-filled skirmish for the same game, by the same mod author.

Clone Wars Era Mod v2.5 released

Listen up, Star Wars: Battlefront II players: The full version of Clone Wars Era Mod v2.5 by Benoz was released.

reTHAWed v4.3 released

Of course there’s always more reTHAWed. There’s so much we have a dedicated mod page now for reTHAWed. We also added one for THUG PRO.

The launch trailer for reTHAWED 4.3 shows off that they’ve indeed ported the entire set of levels from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 into it, complete with details such as cutscenes attempting to be preserved.

As always, lots of customization had been added too. Hats off to the folks at 10K Rising.

Forgotten Hope: Secret Weapon v0.73 released

A new full release of this fan-continuation of Forgotten Hope for Battlefield 1942 had been released.

See the full versions of the above renders on this release article for Forgotten Hope: Secret Weapon v0.73.

Tech News

SteamOS Kicks Ass On The Legion Go S

If you have a Lenovo Legion Go S and want to install Windows on it you’ll come to shoot yourself in the foot. The benchmarks “destroy Windows in peformance and battery life” according to GamingOnLinux and Dave2D. Read all about SteamOS on the Lenovo Legion Go S here.

Waffle House Index getting DMCA’d

Yes, we have to keep talking about Waffle House this month, but it’s serious this time. The Waffle House Index had received a Cease and Desist order.

What is the Waffle House Index?

“If you’ve never heard of the Waffle House Index, you’re in for a bit of weirdly fascinating disaster response lore. The Waffle House Index is an (incredibly) unofficial tool used by FEMA to gauge the severity of natural disasters. Why Waffle House? Because they’re infamous for not closing even during the worst of storms. If the House is closed, that means things are getting real.” – Jack LaFond

So Mr. LaFond set up a site for displaying his scraping of that data, in order to help people. Of course, Waffle House did not like their trademark being used like that and shut it down. We hope for the safe return of the Waffle House Index.

Over & out

And that’s it!

The Overturn Playtest concluded earlier today!

We want to thank everyone who showed up!

When ModDB has done authorizing the post, you can learn more about it here:

Ping! Playtest Over! - Overturn mod for Half-Life

You can also still download and play Overturn: Operation Deathmatch Test and see what all the fuss was about.

This is the first playable release of a game using the new iteration of Nuclide with its new networked object-oriented inventory system.

What does that mean? Well, it’s a bunch of systems that allowed the original development team of Overturn to give you this prototype, which only took a few weeks to make.

The mod had been dormant for over a decade, but thanks to not having to write a single line of code or programming the team implemented the weaponry, item and game object work in record time using the new SDK.

How does that work? As stated, a lot of subsystems are at play there, so we encourage you to simply throw yourself at it. Open overturn/pak000.pk4 like you would any ZIP archive, and look around the decls/ directory specifically.

In the end, the only custom code resides to handle the Heads-Up-Display and additional multiplayer modes. However even items like the flags in CTF are handled via text files. The client and server code is still vanilla Rad-Therapy.

If you want to make prototype a Half-Life mod or a whole standalone game, yours too can be developed in a few weeks, editing nothing but plain text files.