Thrasher Skate and Destroy

Just skate, dude.

PlayStation 1
Released in 1999 by Rockstar Games
Grade: A-

Is skateboarding a sport? Not really, but it sure is physically demanding, and its video games are often classified as sports games, and I happen to love Thrasher Skate and Destroy, so I’m here to proclaim my appreciation for this very under-appreciated game.

It had an unfortunate release date, just 26 days after Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Not only is Tony Hawk a highly successful game that immediately won over reviewers and gamers who never stepped on a skateboard themselves, it also makes the difficult act of skateboarding look effortless and allows shaggy-haired guys in jeans to bounce around like superheroes.

Thrasher, by comparison, makes skateboarding look like trudging through quicksand with a sprained ankle. Its skaters move slower and closer to the ground. You don’t soar from half-pipe to half-pipe with ease, and when you grind on a curb, you slow down and struggle to keep your balance.

On top of that, Thrasher has ugly graphics, smaller environments, and lame fictional characters, like Axl, Jasmine, and Cyrus.

Even the music symbolizes the difference between the games. Thrasher has old-school hip-hop, which is slow and dark compared to Tony Hawk’s pop-punk and ska. Remember ska? It’s been so long since ska has been popular that the word looks unfamiliar.

Anyway, Thrasher was doomed from the start. Due to its lack of success, there are no sequels. Tony Hawk has 19 games to date. I’m not even sure anyone even attempted a realistic skateboarding game until 2007’s Skate on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Thrasher uses controls that are a bit different than Tony Hawk. To do tricks, you input your command before leaving the ground. You hold a button and a direction for various tricks, kickflip, heelflip, 180, etc. This is closer to real skateboarding, where skaters place their feet on the board to make the board flip in various ways. You can also grind rails, leap out of half-pipes, ride a wall, and land in a “manual,” where you balance the board on two wheels.

The speed of the game is more realistic as well, with skaters who need some room to speed up and who slow down quickly.

To advance through the game, you simply have two minutes to ride around and do enough tricks to earn a high enough score to pass the level. This is simplistic compared to Tony Hawk’s elaborate career mode, where you’ve got a bunch of tasks to complete and items to find, which often require repeating the level over and over.

The only gag is that you have to skate away from the hapless police officer when the time runs out. Otherwise he blasts you with a goddamn TASER and you have to start over again. Crazy but true.

As you pass levels, you advance to the next and add new tricks to your arsenal (which, by the way, you can view in the pause menu at any time).

Once you get all the tricks and all the levels, which isn’t hard to do, that’s when the beauty of this game kicks in. That’s when you just … skate.

Don’t worry about your score. Don’t worry about the stupid cop. Just skate.

See, skateboarding isn’t a sport. It’s an art.

So, skate around and make your tricks look cool. It helps if you’ve seen skateboarding before and can appreciate it. If so, landing a simple kickflip with just the right timing can be sweetly satisfying. Grind a box with just the right approach and speed so that when you come off the other end, you land in a realistic way. Ollie over a set of stairs and land just inches past the last step.

That’s what this game is about, not stringing together 20 tricks, leaping from rail to rail in superhuman ways, magically ascending sides of buildings to find the secret spot where the last item is hiding.

You can just have this game on while hanging out, passing the controller back and forth between friends, each person skating the environment however they want. It’s great for when you find yourself saying, “I’ve got 20 minutes before I need to leave for work, and I’ve got nothing else I want to do.”

I love this stupid game.

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