''Tony Hawk's Project 8'' is a

skateboarding Skateboarding is an action sport originating in the United States that involves riding and performing tricks using a skateboard, as well as a recreational activity, an art form, an entertainment industry job, and a method of transportation ...

video game and the eighth installment in the ''

Tony Hawk's ''Tony Hawk's'' is a skateboarding video game series published by Activision and endorsed by the American professional skateboarder of the same name. The series was primarily developed for home consoles by Neversoft from launch to 2007, unti ...

'' series. It was developed by Neversoft and published by

Activision Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one ...

in November 2006 for the

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, and

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. The game complements the release of '' Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam'', which is conversely available on

Nintendo is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade playing cards ...

systems along with the PlayStation 2 respectively.

Plot

Tony Hawk, impressed with the player's town's undiscovered skate talent, announces the creation of a new skating team entitled 'Project 8', where eight of the town's best skateboarders will be selected for the team. The player character starts ranked 200th and by completing challenges and goals, their ranking will gradually improve.

Gameplay

The 6th-generation versions of the game (PlayStation 2, Xbox) as well as the PlayStation Portable version utilize the engine of the previous installment, ''

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland ''Tony Hawk's American Wasteland'' is a skateboarding video game developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. It is the seventh entry in the ''Tony Hawk's'' series and was released initially for the GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox in ...

'', and the games that proceeded it. However, the 7th-generation versions (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) featured a completely new game engine and gameplay to accommodate the more advanced hardware (while too released on the Xbox 360, ''American Wasteland'' remained largely the same on that console). For the 7th-generation versions, ''Project 8'' features an open world, which contains various

skate park A skatepark, or skate park, is a purpose-built recreational environment made for skateboarding, BMX, scootering, wheelchairs, and aggressive inline skating. A skatepark may contain half-pipes, handrails, funboxes, vert ramps, stairsets, qua ...

s and hidden sections. The open world is linear and visibly connected, in contrast to the loading tunnels in ''American Wasteland''. In the 6th-generation version, the levels are separate and have to be manually selected. There are 45 skaters in the game, including unlockable characters, who each have a unique mo-cap style, providing a different experience and no recycled animations.

New features

The game introduces the 'nail the trick' option. When a player enters this mode the camera will zoom in on the side to focus on the skateboard and the character's feet. Players are then able to use the right analog and left analog sticks to control the right and left feet, allowing the player to flip and rotate the board in any such manner, including tapping the underside of the board in the air and merging various techniques to form new moves. Another new ability in the game is to control the characters in the game during bails, allowing the player to obtain a high "Hospital bill", with bonus money awarded for broken bones; this feature is used in numerous challenges across the story mode (on PS3 and Xbox 360). Players can also induce a bail manually. The option to walk, which was introduced in ''

Tony Hawk's Underground ''Tony Hawk's Underground'' is a skateboarding video game and the fifth entry in the ''Tony Hawk's'' series after '' Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4''. It was developed by Neversoft and published by Activision in 2003 for the GameCube, PlayStation 2, ...

'', is retained. The game also features a system named "Stokens"; landing combos in front of pedestrians will "stoke" them and give you Stokens, which the player can then use to buy items in-game. In the seventh-generation version, knocking over a pedestrian will cause them to chase the skater and retaliate, but the player is able to evade this if they skate far enough away.

Reception

The game was met with mostly positive reviews upon release, with the Xbox 360 version garnering an overall average of 81% on

GameRankings GameRankings was a video gaming review aggregator that was founded in 1999 and owned by CBS Interactive. It indexed over 315,000 articles relating to more than 14,500 video games. GameRankings was discontinued in December 2019, with its staff bei ...

. It was especially the subject of praise for its "Nail the Trick" mode and graphical enhancements. It also received criticism for the removal of several key features. In the

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review of the PlayStation 3 version, ''Project 8'' was criticized for its unstable

framerate Frame rate (expressed in or FPS) is the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images ( frames) are captured or displayed. The term applies equally to film and video cameras, computer graphics, and motion capture systems. Frame rate may also be ...

.Tony Hawk's Project 8 for PlayStation 3 Review - PlayStation 3 Tony Hawk's Project 8 Review
/ref> IGN and GameSpot noted and criticized the absence of online functionality across all three PlayStation versions.

Notes

References

{{Tony Hawk games 2006 video games Activision games Multiplayer and single-player video games Neversoft games PlayStation 2 games PlayStation 3 games PlayStation Portable games Skateboarding video games Project 8 Video games set in the United States Video games featuring protagonists of selectable gender Xbox games Xbox 360 games Video games using Havok Video games with custom soundtrack support D.I.C.E. Award for Sports Game of the Year winners Video games developed in the United States Page 44 Studios games