7 Video Game Sequels That Gave You LESS

You want to talk about omitting features? Well how about we skip a few steps and talk about a game that was almost omitted in its entirety.

In the early 00s, when we had the collective delusion that baggy trousers and wallet chains looked cool, few video game franchises had the pulling power of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games. Cashing in on the punky counter-culture sphere that skateboarding found itself in, the games gave fans an opportunity to skate, grind and ollie their way through a series of environments in pursuit of the highest scores and longest combos they could muster.

Following a long hiatus as gaming tastes changed, and an upcoming expiration of the game license, Activision hastily cobbled together some bits of code they found down the back of the sofa, burned about a third of it onto a disc, and sold it at full market price hoping nobody would notice.

With the game disc largely being a receiver for a multi gigabyte day one patch, once the download had eventually completed fans were treated to a lacklustre and cynical bodge job designed only for legal reasons. Omitting previous features such as switching grind tricks in the same sequence, flatland tricks, the ability to get off the board, climb, slow time, or drive vehicles, what remained was a bare husk of a skating game with PS2 graphics, a counter-intuitive control set up and environments so bland they’d make a Soviet gulag look festive.

Thankfully, a well made 2020 remaster of the original two games has snapped up nostalgia and reclaimed some of the franchise’s previous reputation, but for a while it looked like this skating institution was destined to end on one hell of a wipeout.