Tony Hawk's American Sk8land
- Platform: Nintendo DS
- Published by: Activision
- Developed by: Vicarious Visions
- Release Date: Nov 14, 2005
- Genre: Sports
- Multiplayer: Yes
- Online: Yes
Tony Hawk's American Sk8land Preview Continued..
-- October 25, 2005 by: Chris Remo
Tony Hawk's American Sk8land Multiplayer
"We really think online on handhelds is going to change everything, it's the next big thing," claims Bala. "It's inexpensive, you don't need your own broadband service. Lots of people are going to step up to the plate [and start playing online.] We're really proud to be the first online 3rd party on DS and one of the first online overall."
With such lofty sentiments at heart, Vicarious Visions didn't hold back with multiplayer features. The team that handled the multiplayer was the same team that programmed the multiplayer component for the Xbox version of Doom 3, so their netcode should be sharp. The online play itself comes in the form of head-to-head matches, which are either matchmade or private. Once you sign into the online service, you'll have access to a list of your friends that are online and given the option to join a game with any of them. Upon doing so, the two of you will be placed in a free skate "waiting room" with text chat while whoever is hosting the game sets up the options. Game types include The Price is Wrong, which has both players trying to get as close as possible to (but not above!) a specific score; Horse, the classic Tony Hawk game of one-upmanship; Combo Mambo, which has each player trying to outdo the other with the biggest single combo; Graffiti, in which you can bust out your homemade tag to try to spray more of the city; a straight score competition, and a few other.
If you like, you can also record custom sound clips for your character to exclaim whenever you complete a special move, complete a gap transfer, or bail. Each one of those can have a unique recording, and it will be broadcast to your opponent when you perform the corresponding move. The developers anticipate some... colorful slogans.
Vicarious Visions is going all out to create an online community for Sk8land. In addition to the Nintendo-run gameplay servers, Vicarious Visions will be operating a site at AmericanSk8land.com (not yet operational) that tracks player scores and statistics, shares user-created graphics, and hosts player-recorded replays. Let's go through that one by one. First of all, there will be online leaderboards and score databases, similar to what Bungie has for Halo 2 over Xbox Live. You'll be able to access that information through a web browser on your PC or directly through your DS. Players can also save their board designs and graffiti designs to the server, and download those created by other players for their own use.
So let's say you're browsing through those leaderboards, and you simply cannot accept that some guy got 12 million points in a single combo. Well, now you'll be able to download the 
replay of the game in which he scored that combo, so you can see for yourself how he did it. The community server will host these replays, which can then be downloaded to players' systems, where they can play head-to-head against a ghosted version of that replay. Bala notes that replays will serve multiple purposes: to maintain credibility if players are accused of submitting hacked scores to the server, to give beginners a unique way to learn from the masters, and of course simply to show off. Considering how frighteningly impressive the best Tony players are, it should be interesting what kid of replays enjoy heavy circulation.
You can also form a Crew (aka clan) with your friends, which will cause your standings to contribute to your Crew's score and which will allow you to challenge members of other Crews to head-to-head ranked battles. The top Crews will be featured on both the game's site and Nintendo's site. The Sk8land site will also contain various community features such as moderated forums.
Somewhat surprisingly, Vicarious Visions also plans to keep the game regularly updated with free downloadable content in the form of new missions, new score challenges, and so on. They will download straight to free space allocated on the cartridge, so once you've gotten a piece of content you won't need to stream it again. The developers have anticipated that there will be Tony veterans who master the game quite quickly, so they already have at least six months of new content planned. "If people like it, we'll make more," said Bala. "There's a lot to do with this game."
Bala considers Tony Hawk's American Sk8land to be the first game that truly takes advantage of all of the DS' features. He cites full consistent 3D, streaming environments, touch screen use, microphone use, local wireless, online support, spatial sound positioning, voice acting, a full soundtrack, and downloadable content as evidence of this. Vicarious Visions definitely put a lot of thought and effort into ensuring that the game makes good use of the system's hardware, while not letting the system's hardware interfere with solid game design.
Despite the DS' surprisingly strong lineup of late, with a library that seems to be getting stronger all the time, most would probably agree that the best of the system's gems are the more unique and daring titles. It's not exactly the system of choice for home console spinoffs and ports. With Tony Hawk's American Sk8land, however, Vicarious Visions seems to be hitting on a nice compromise of mainstream accessibility and good use of the system's hardware features. And, of course, online never hurts. Tony Hawk's American Sk8land will be released simultaneously with the launch of Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection on November 14 for Nintendo DS. The Game Boy Advance version is already in stores.
