After five Game Boy Advance games and three Nintendo DS sequels, Vicarious Visions is taking a breather with the Tony Hawk series and handing the reigns over to Boston-based Creat Studios to build up a brand new take on the skateboarding genre. Activision swung by the IGN offices to give them a taste of the final product: Tony Hawk's Motion, a unique game in the Tony Hawk series that employs tilt control via an add-on peripheral that plugs into the bottom of the system.
G4TV's Sterling McGarvery Writes:
I still remember the Sunday afternoon in October 1999 when I caught a subway to a Blockbuster Video to rent Tony Hawk's Pro Skater based on a neighbor's recommendation. Little did I realize that it would spark a love affair that would start before the Birdman Bandwagon fired up and would last well beyond the point at which "Downhill Jam" wasn't just a spin-off, it was a pithy descriptor of the series.
The Pixel Painter add–on certainly makes a break from the daily grind of the featureless, drab world of this poor imitation of a Tony Hawk title. But equally doesn't save this game from the overflowing bin called 'opportunity missed'.
The tilt controls are used to turn your board left and right. They don't work too badly, and you can adjust the sensitivity, but it all feels a bit superfluous and gimmicky rather than an integral part of the game. And with the shoulder buttons used to accelerate and jump, and trickery performed with the face buttons and then some special moves mapped to the touch screen, everything's cluttered. The game also looks dreadful.
