- by Owen Morton
Okay. I thought that with Tekken, as discussed back in December, I had come up against the most irritating computer game of all time. Surely nothing could be more vacuous than randomly mashing buttons in an attempt to beat the living daylights out of a computer generated opponent? Well … when I put it like that, there probably isn’t. But that isn’t going to stop me talking about Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro with equal bile.
As some may have detected, I really don’t have an awful lot of time for computer games nowadays. (By ‘don’t have time’, I mean I don’t care about them. I do actually have time to play them, if I so chose.) As I mention with perhaps alarming regularity, the only computer game worth your time is … FreeCell.
Others who live in this house (the same others who watch Bargain Hunt, by the way), however, seem to think differently. That’s their prerogative, I suppose. If they want to sit there on the sofa playing Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro, then it’s entirely up to them. The thing is about Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro is that it’s one of those games which – unlike Tekken, which if you tried to emulate in real life, you’d end up in a nice secure facility – if you want to partake in such an activity, you should actually go out and do it. From the title of the game, you should be able to deduce its raison d’etre: yes, it is indeed a computer generated vehicle by which you can pretend to be skateboarding.
If you ask me, if you want to skateboard, you might as well go outside and skateboard. To be totally and absolutely fair, I have never played Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro, nor have I ever attempted to skateboard, but I would be willing to bet that sitting on a sofa staring at a screen while manipulating a little pad in your hands is not entirely comparable to being outside in the air whizzing about on a skateboard. (Not that I really think the latter activity is really worth doing, either, but it does at least have the bonus of being outdoors.)
Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro, however, I believe to be a total waste of time. My two friends who like the game spent a good five hours playing it on Saturday, which is more time than I spent playing FreeCell (I only played four games, meaning I only played it for about five minutes) that day. Seriously, how can they not have had anything better to do with their lives than pretend to be skateboarders? Admittedly, one of them is, like me, a history student, and our required work for this week consists of reading a text which includes sentences like this:
“However, that class of cause-and-effect speculators, with whom no wonder would remain wonderful, but all things in Heaven and Earth must be computed and ‘accounted for’; and even the Unknown, the Infinite in man’s Life, had under the words enthusiasm, superstition, spirit of the age and so forth, obtained, as it were, an algebraical symbol and given value,–have now wellnigh played their part in European culture; and may be considered, as in most countries, even in England itself where they linger the latest, verging towards extinction.”
I can perhaps understand why he wants to play Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro instead. I mean, does that sentence – which I assure you is entirely typical of the text – make any sense to anybody out there? I have absolutely no conception of what the bloody thing is on about. Unfortunately, on Thursday I will have to talk about this text in a discussion group which is presided over by one of the less pleasant staff members of the University of York history department (who I sincerely hope does not read this website), so I’d better figure out what it does mean before then.
Anyway, to return to the subject of Tony Hawks: Skateboarder Pro, I am regrettably now incapable of thinking of anything further to say, so I’m going to have to shut up about it now.