The Next Town Over

Last night was a rough night. I got unceremoniously startled awake by our youngest cat at two in the morning and struggled to get back to sleep. While I have never been diagnosed with having a panic attack, I had what I can only deem as one. It felt like my heart was beating out of my chest even though both my blood pressure and heart rate were in the normal ranges. On top of that I could not get my mind to shut off. This morning I have to go into work, which in the time of largely unchecked COVID-19 spread is always stressful given that there is no legitimate reason why I should need to do this thing other than for “face” with my management. On the way into work I have to drop our eldest cat at the vet for a glucose check, and if she so much as gets a hint of the cat carrier being around she freaks out and often pisses all over whoever is carrying her. Basically my brain went into overdrive running through the worst possible scenarios of how my morning was going to go… all the while ensuring that my day was going to be shit due to sleep deprivation.
A few weeks back I shared my concerns about how successful this console generation launch would ultimately be, and last night it seems some of those concerns were at least warranted. The reluctance of both Microsoft and Sony to reveal pricing and start pre-orders made me think that in both cases supplies for 2020 would be exceptionally limited if for no reason other than the constraints of ramping up production during a pandemic. Last night emails went out to Sony account holders, but I am not exactly sure what determined getting one versus the many folks who did not. I am wondering in my case if it was tied to PlayStation Plus access, because I have long considered that just part of the cost of owning a PlayStation console. The email is not a preorder notice… but instead a notice that you can now register for the opportunity to preorder a console. The verbiage contained within the email and on the registration page goes a little something like this.
There will be a limited quantity of PS5™ consoles available for pre-order, so we will be inviting some of our existing consumers to be one of the first to pre-order one from PlayStation.

Sony Playstation 5 Pre-Order Registration Email
If you did not get one of the emails you can register through the page on PlayStation.com. I signed up because I had avoided purchasing a PlayStation 4 Pro in part because I was planning on upgrading to the 5 this year. I’ve squirreled away some cash for this purpose and have already prepared the spouse for this expense. In theory once the pre-orders open I will pop in and try and reserve a unit, but I do feel like I will be racing the bots.
When you submit your registration you are asked to provide your PlayStation ID, which is likely there to try and stop bots from scooping these all up to scalp for a premium. That said I would not be surprised if those same craigslist/ebay flippers are now instead creating a number of bogus PlayStation accounts, since you can do that without owning a console. It does however make me wonder if they are going to prioritize this system somehow, so that the first wave is to folks who have verified ownership of a PlayStation 4 and an active PlayStation Plus account or something along those lines. It will be interesting to see how this system plays out.
The majority of my game time last night was spent snuggling with cats on the sofa and playing some more New World. This time I started the game in a vastly different location than I did during my first test, and as a result getting to other territories seems considerably easier. As such I have popped over to the next settlement that the quest chain sent me to. However the quests I am being given are still sending me back across the border for various objectives.
I’ve leveled to 17 so far, and I believe the highest I had gotten in the previous test was somewhere in the vicinity of 25. My first time in the game I was picking abilities from all over the place and as a result I created something that felt very uneven to play. Now that I have focused largely on the defensive tree for sword and equipped a full set of heavy armor I feel considerably more sturdy than I was previously. As a result I seem to be able to take encounters that are significantly higher than my level, and have successfully defeated packs of 23ish mobs that aggro’d onto me while exploring.
Last night I found myself however switching things up and starting to level healing staff a bit. I found out that it seems weapon experience is gained by whatever weapon you last damaged the mob with. So I can whittle something down with Sword and Shield, and then swap quickly to Healing Staff and get that last hit in allowing that weapon to soak the benefit of the full experience. As a result I have poured on some very quick levels and at the very least now have that AOE pulse heal which comes in handy for recovering from a rough encounter.
One of the biggest frustrations that I have had so far in combat is really a two fold problem. Firstly I really hate how hard it can be to get a tag in on a mob when there are multiple people fighting it, as instead you end up registering hits on the players (and since I am not flagged it is effectively damage that just poofs). The second frustration is how seemingly random the aggro table seems to be on mobs. I would be interested to see how the formula actually works because the game seems to be fairly unacceptable to trains, aka where a large number of disengaging mobs chain onto a new target. I noticed this happen a few times in the previous test and I have seen it happen to me a few times here to a lesser extent.
All in all though, I am still really enjoying myself. As Bhagpuss said in his comment yesterday, if it released tomorrow I would likely happily play it in production while they stomp any residual bugs over time. I did not at all expect myself to enjoy the game in the way I have, and I am interested to see how it shapes as it nears release. The post The Next Town Over appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

New World: Diamond in the Rough

One of the problems about an NDA is that it can keep players who are really enjoying the experience of a game fro evangelizing it. This has been the case with me and New World, that is until the current preview of the game. The NDA was lifted and I can finally share all the thoughts I had about my experiences… the challenge now however is I am not exactly sure where to begin. I will admit that based on the marketing of this game, it seemed like something I probably would not like. The early heavy PVP focus would have been a massive turn off. However at some point during the development cycle they made a hard pivot to more of a PVE experience, and attempting to buffer the world with more lore and story.
If you have played Greedfall, you understand the basic conceit of the game. Essentially there is a new island that has been discovered, and your expedition is attempting to colonize it. The thing is, the island is very much not new and you are very much not the first expedition. It appears that folks have been trying to colonize the island for untold centuries, but that there is some malevolent force on the island that possesses everyone that arrives. As a result the island is littered with the ruins of past settlements and the “withered” inhabitants that have been claimed by the spirit of the island, and will attack you on sight with track star zombie like vigor.

Combat

Your game play begins as your expedition is scuttled by some very angry rock tentacle looking things and you wash ashore in a ship graveyard. You stumble disheveled through a very scripted combat event, explaining the basics and from there you are pointed towards an objective to begin your experience in the new world. While we are here lets wind our way into combat. If I were to describe it, I would compare it to Elder Scrolls Online because you have a very similar set up. You have a dodge initially bound to the space bar, light attack is bound to a tap of the left mouse button, heavy attack is bound to a long press of the left mouse button and block is bound to holding down the right mouse button. Once you find ranged weapons, the block shifts to aiming your weapon with left firing.
The game has no classes and as a result you are mostly distinguished by your choice of armor type and weapon type much like Elder Scrolls Online. For weapons you have a choice between seven options. Equipping a straight sword gives you the ability to equip a shield for defense along with it. Hatchet is a very mobile weapon that eventually includes the ability to throw it. Warhammer is a big two hander that is slow and smashy. Fire Staff gives you access to elemental magical attacks, and Life Staff represents your healing options. Bow and Musket represent the dichotomy of fast and agile verses slow and hard hitting. Each weapon has its own progression system so you can in theory learn how to be proficient with all of them.
Using a weapon gains experience for that weapon, and then you can spend those points in a skill tree of sorts unlocking new abilities and buffing your general combat abilities. Each weapon offers two different trees designed to represent different play styles. For sword the first tree starts off with a spin attack and then offers you a bunch of abilities that are buffed if you are attacking from the back. The second tree focuses more on the shield and buffing your health and ability to soak damage. This is not explained at any point and when I first played the game I made a number of very poor decisions as to my build. This time around I am building significantly more tanky and am enjoying the sword and shield gameplay more as a result.

Questing and Lore

The quests in the game will send you out into the island to explore various areas, but in my experience are pretty simple mechanically. Essentially it seems like you have “kill the thing”, “get a specific drop”, and “loot the chest” type quests. Eventually you can partake of PVP quests that involve such gems as “deliver the thing”, but given that I am trying to forget that PVP exists in the game I have no clue how these actually function. The quests are uninspired, but mechanically are fine and largely just serve as giving you a purpose for being in the right level range area at the right time.
Another word of warning is that if you are going into New World expecting a deep story driven experience… this isn’t the game for you. If you are not a reader of quest text, you will have NO CLUE what is actually going on in the world. I mean that is fine because the story is largely superfluous and you can play the game perfectly successfully without it. This is one of those games where the story is told through exploration in the world and finding scattered documents in the abandoned settlements. piecing these together you get a feel for what happened to those who came before, and occasionally give you hints about where to find other features. This note for example hints about a nearby wolf den, that admittedly you can just stumble onto yourself.

Settlements

The game has made a lot of interesting choices, and I guess time will tell which were wise and which were foolish. The first of these is the fact that there are no NPC vendors in the entire game, or at least the the sort that allow you to unload your vendor trash for coin. The only way to sell items is on the Trading Post and this is entirely player driven. As a crafter I think this is pretty great, because I never again have to make the decision of if I should sell an item for gold or if I should break it down for crafting materials. If I get a drop that I don’t think would interest other players… I rapidly salvage the item in my inventory and move on with my life. The negative of this system however is depending on where you start certain resources might be exceptionally hard to get your hands on.
Your view of the world largely focuses on a settlement. At first this will be the the settlement near where you start the game. For me it was Monarch’s Bluffs and in a previous play through it was a settlement called First Light. It seems as though each region of the map has one major settlement and one fort, and the faction and company that holds the fort also holds the city. There is likely a rich PVP based system that exists to determine this, but once again I am completing ignoring that. For me who holds a settlement seems to not really matter at all.
Each region of the game has a faction associated with it and this levels up as you do things that would gain you favor. This can be completing quests or just doing things like killing random baddies that you might encounter along the way. When you level up you a presented with a series of choices that provide quality of life changes to that region for you. For example in this case I have the choice between lowering my trading tax fee a the trading post, increasing the speed at which I gather resources or gaining more faction tokens each time I complete a mission for my chosen faction. These choices end up giving you a reason to support a specific area, and when you get level 25 with a faction you can purchase housing.
Another one of those interesting decisions that I spoke of is the fact that what we would think of as a banking system, is tied to a specific settlement. You are granted access to a storage shed and additional storage space is another one of the options you can occasionally choose when you gain levels with a given region. Your items stored will only be available while you are in a given region and once you cross over into another settlement, you will be starting back at square one both in access to space and for item availability. This makes me think that the game is designed in such a way as to drive loyalty to a given region by the players.

Player Factions

At a specific point in the quest line, you will be asked to choose a faction. Once again I am going to throw back to Greedfall, because you could essentially name the three factions the Coin Guard, Alchemists and the Church if you wanted to. The green team are more aligned to military might and adventuring, the purple team is stealth and forbidden knowledge and the yellow team is the might of divine right. For me it seemed like Green team was the ideal fit… largely because I like fighty things and the color green is my favorite… also skulls are cool. The only negative about these factions is your company… aka the guild equivalent, will be limited to only members of a specific faction. So you will have to convince all of your friends to be cool with the same lore tropes. Really for me, I am fine with pretty much everything but team Yellow, because I have no desire to align to the church.
If you don’t care about PVP however, the choices are largely interchangeable with the primary difference being the armor sets that are available to you through the faction currency. Regardless of who holds a territory, there will be a representative of each faction in each settlement it seems. Other than the main quest chain, there will be a constant repeating stream of faction quests and town quests available. These send you out into the world and the first row is completely PVE focused with the second row all requiring you to flag up in order to partake. I’ve only ever done the first row of quests because again, I am pretending that PVP does not exist in the game.
Town quests come from the Project Board, and this gets into one of the really interesting aspects of the game. The players are effectively improving the settlement as they play the game, and at any point a player can plunk down 100 gold and declare a project to upgrade something. For example in the above picture there is a project to upgrade the Forge to Tier 3 increasing the sort of items that you can craft with it. The other project is to upgrade the Gates to Tier 2, which I believe are involved with the PVP siege game play allowing for the town to be more easily defended. In both cases there are three quests at a time offered, and each of these reward 10 points towards a given project with 3000 total points needed to complete the project. Each player that takes town quests is all working towards the same shared benefits.

Crafting Systems

The game has an exceptionally rich crafting system, that once again I would liken to the experience of playing Elder Scrolls Online. The key difference being there is seemingly nothing holding you back from just leveling everything as they each are progressed independently of each other. These are divided up into three general categories: Gathering raw resources, Refining those resources into materials and then Crafting something from materials. Since I am playing a heavy armored tanky character, I have spent most of my time focused on weaponsmithing and armoring which cover melee weapons and metal armor. From what I can tell, nothing exists in the game that cannot be crafted and the majority of your loot are resources that can then be crafted with.
Gathering is a bit interesting in that there are not just fields worth of nodes out there in the world. Most everything that you can see can be gathered in some way. The trees that are in the above screenshot can be chopped down, the plants can be gathered… and the Iron Vein that I stumbled across can be mined. Rock is extremely plentiful for example, but ore is a little harder to find with specific resources appearing in specific biomes and areas. For example if you find a ruined settlement that was a mine or a quarry… chances are you are going to find ore. If you find a settlement that was a farm, you are going to find things like herbs and various vegetables that you can harvest. Things are just scarce enough that I find myself constantly scanning the horizon for any resource that might come in handy.
When it comes to crafting the items itself… there are a bunch of levers to pull and knobs to turn. When crafting an item there are base requirements and then a few things you can do to increase your chance of getting something interesting. You can add additional primary resource in order to influence the chance of getting a gem socket, or at a resource called Azoth in order to increase a perk appearing on the item. Occasionally you will find something out in the world that allows you to place a specific perk as well. I think the idea being, that in the end game you will be able to directly influence the type of item you are producing if you have sufficient skill and sufficient resources.
The crafting machines are located in your settlement, and are scattered throughout the town with them largely appearing in one of two areas. Everything you can craft has both material requirements and machine requirements. For example moving up a tier in food requires you to have access to a tier 2 kitchen, but moving up to the third tier would require access to a tier 3 kitchen and so forth. This feeds that desire for a town to evolve and for the players to run those town project quests because it ultimately benefits everyone, or at least everyone that is interested in getting items crafted.

Your Campsite

New World is a game without fast travel or mounts, and the various activities will involve you traversing vast distances. Inevitably you are going to die, which makes life a little tricky. Any player can run up to me and resurrect me as I am bleeding out, however I watched three players in the general vicinity do nothing, meaning I had to eventually respawn more or less pushing me back to the settlement. Depending on where I happened to be, this might mean a rather lengthy run to get back to where I was questing. Thankfully the game has what I consider to be my favorite system to handle this.
At nearly any moment, with some minor restrictions as to placement… you can hit Y and build a camp site. This requires 5 pieces of wood and 1 piece of flint, which are exceptionally common throughout the island and has the effect of resetting your respawn point. In addition to that you can use any players camp to craft some very basic materials like simple food and crude gathering tools. You can also use a camp to rest, which allows you to regenerate health at a vastly increased pace. For me at least this means that I am never not carrying wood and flint and when I find myself questing out in the middle of nowhere I always plunk down a camp site just to serve as a life line in case I happen to die. This allows me to get back into the action quickly and respawn significantly closer to the objective.

The Rough Spots

I’ve gone on for some time about the features, and during that I covered a ton of the positives of the game. Now I guess as I close things up I should probably talk about some of the negatives. The first and most immediately apparent is that New World does not have a good character creation system. The models for characters look on par with memories of Fallout 3, and have sadly far fewer options. They are what I would expect for a pvp kill box game where you don’t really care about roleplay, and not what I would expect from a MMORPG. I hope given the delay they can maybe work on this system a bit because it is very much not amazing.
Combat has some weirdness to it as well, namely when it comes to hit registration. If you and the thing you are attacking are on different elevations… even the most slight of differences… you can end up just swinging at the air which is extremely frustrating when you hit a special attack. Special attacks are extremely powerful… but also have insanely long cooldowns meaning you are going to have them up about every other fight if you are rolling through encounters. There is some weirdness with switching weapons as you can get animation locked limiting the usefulness of say having a ranged weapon that you open combat with and then switching to a melee weapon for close combat. It works, it is just way more kludgy than I would have liked.
One of my key complaints from earlier testing was that the radius for what counted as killing something within a certain area was very very short. This appears to have improved significantly but it still can be really hard to find a certain number of wolves for example around a certain den. The spawn rate seems to be either feast or famine, where you can be standing around waiting forever for something to spawn in… or the spawns are happening so fast that you get overwhelmed. I am hoping they continue to tweak this, as it was better for this test than it had be in previous iterations.

Final Thoughts

As I said at the beginning of this massive post, New World was not a game I expected to like. However after having played it for a significant number of hours and through multiple tests I am really looking forward to it launching. They are making some big gambles by constraining the player to largely interact with a specific settlement, but it might also create a game with multiple rich player environments rather than a single vibrant city. I am on board with the crafting system, and I legitimately find combat to be enjoyable. Really for me however this is a game about exploring a very beautiful world, and I like just roaming around looking for resources. I am fully on board with this game and plan on playing when it eventually launches. So now I ask you my readers, have you had a chance to play the game? If so what were your thoughts? Drop me a line below because I am very interesting in hearing about your experiences now that I can finally talk about it. The post New World: Diamond in the Rough appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Revisiting Hades

Today’s post is going to take a bit of a strange twist. Admittedly it is nowhere near the ride that was yesterdays post, but it is going some places. I feel like I need to make a quick side note and thank everyone for the positive response to my tale of being trapped in a small town. I appreciate it greatly even though my brain struggles to believe it. However lets get back to the story at hand, because it might also be a little long in the tooth if I am not extremely careful. The first thing you need to know about today’s post is what /NoClip is. For the aging among us we will know without a doubt that it is a command line argument that allows you as the player to pass through walls. However more specifically for the focus on this post, it is a group helmed by Danny O’Dwyer that seeks to make documentary films covering the gaming industry. I love the work that they do in part because they are really great films but likely a bigger portion is because I have long dreamed of working in the industry. It is funded largely by Patreon, which I back and the above screenshot is from a really good video on Dwarf Fortress.
For a bit they have been doing a series on the development process of Hades, the fourth release from Supergiant Games. Here comes another side jaunt, because I feel like it is important to understand that I really love Supergiant Games. I loved Bastion and Transistor was a bit of a darling among the AggroChat crew as we gushed upon it over the course of several episodes. Pyre was a bit of a venture off into odd sportsball territory and I did not love playing the game, but I loved the story of the game and ultimately still played quite a bit of it. Hades however takes things back into a direction that is in my wheelhouse, but more about that in a few. /NoClip has been embedded with Supergiant Games during the course of its development cycle and as a result has been releasing this series of really cool videos covering its life cycle. They covered the launch of early access on Epic Game Store that immediately followed an announcement during The Game Awards. Other videos have taken a deep dive into the patching process and how the music and art assets are created. This week they released a video that I don’t think officially slots into the series but covers the struggles the team has had trying to function in our current COVID-19 world. They are all pretty great, so here is a list for you to follow up on your own if you so choose. Fair warning, most of the videos are somewhere in the ballpark of 40 minutes.
I originally purchased early access on Epic Game Store on December 6th of 2018… aka immediately after the game got announced on The Game Awards. I have not however really been playing it much, and the most recent doc made me want to explore it again. For the uninitiated, Hades is a Rogue Lite Action RPG where you play as Zagreus, son of Hades. You’ve decided that you are done with being in the Underworld and want to escape so you can join the rest of your family on Mount Olypmus. However in order to do so, you are going to have to fight your way out of Hell.. aka the Underworld of Greek Mythology.
As you fight your way through the underworld, you will be terribly outmatched and will likely find yourself dying rather quickly. Each time you die you will resurrect in the pool of blood located in Hades audience chamber. Each iteration through the dungeon opens up new interactions with the other members of House Hades, and these dialog prompts often serve as tips on how to deal with more frustrating encounters. You will of course be constantly taunted by your Father, who just wants you to stop this nonsense and return to your duties.
Along the way however you are assisted by other gods that want to see you succeed… the first of which being your adopted mother Nyx. While traversing the labyrinthine passages you will discover boons from the gods. It seems that there are a great number of gods that don’t particularly like Hades and would like to see you succeed. As a result they are willing to lend you their power temporarily in order to hasten your escape.
These boons in general give the player a choice between three different options. Each one changes the way the attacks work slightly and serve as a bit of a mutator to shape your play. In order to succeed you will need to adapt the way you approach your encounters to match the features of the boon. The first of these will be available immediately upon entering the underworld, and another one generally follows rapidly giving you a few options as you ascend.
Earlier I said two things that I suppose I should explain a bit. First I said this game is a Rogue Lite, and not a Rogue Like. The difference to me generally has a bunch of different distinctions but the first and most important of these is that as you traverse the Underworld you are able to gain permanent power increases that carry forward with you. I also said that the first god to help you was Nyx, your adopted mother and she granted you the power of her Mirror of Night. While traversing the underworld you can collect a currency called Darkness, which can be spent in your room through the mirror to slowly and surely increase your power level between play throughs.
The other primary aspect of the Rogue Lite is that while there is a heavy emphasis on randomization, and each play through is going to be significantly different… the rooms that you traverse along the way are very much hand crafted. Each entry into the Underworld represents a branching path that ultimately leads to a boss encounter before moving to the next area. While the order of the rooms and the encounters in each of them is different, there are specific rooms with specific encounters and the symbol on the door gives you a rough approximation of the type of room. For example in the above screenshot the room on the left will reward Darkness upon completion, and the room on the right will reward Gemstones that are used for constructing new things in the House of Hades.
The game itself is split up into multiple biomes, and each of those have a set of enemies that can spawn and that you might encounter along the way. While traversing the underworld you will encounter keys, which can be used for a few things but likely the most important is unlocking new weapons. Right now I currently have access to a two handed sword, a bow, a shield and a spear. I believe as you ascend higher you will encounter other weapons including a gun of some sort. Right now I seem to be stuck on the shield as I enjoy its mechanics. I’m playing with mouse and keyboard and it seems to fit nicely with that playstyle. The game itself however has full controller support and that is likely the actual intended way one should be playing this.
No matter what order you take the rooms, it will eventually end in a boss encounter. The first boss is Megaera a Fury, that is extremely quick and I have yet to beat. That said I only started playing again last night and restarted on a Steam copy instead of my original from Epic Game Store. I am not entirely certain if progress should carry over between the two, but I lost a hard drive since when I last played the game so regardless I started fresh last night. The game is exceptionally fun, and the fact that no matter how badly you do… it is highly likely that some progress will carry over at least in the form of new dialog prompts makes it feel like your deaths are serving a greater purpose.
The other thing that I really like about Hades is how fast a cycle of play ends up being. I can pop in and play a bit and feel like I made some progress and then get out and do other things. The game is eventually releasing on the Nintendo Switch once a proper launch happens, and I figure I will pick it up there was well. This is an ideal game to play in that time between when I lay down and when sleep claims me. Admittedly it was the doc series that got me interested in writing about the game, but I figure if nothing else it serves as an introduction to anyone who is not already aware. The game is exceptionally well crafted, as has everything from Supergiant Games been. Right now the game is available on Steam and on Epic Game Store. I know in the future a Switch Version is coming out and I believe it has also been announced for the PlayStation but with no firm dates on either. If you like Action RPGs or Rogue Lites, then I would suggest checking it out. The 1.0 release is in theory slated for late 2020, but given the state of the world I could see that maybe pushing back a bit. For now on Steam and Epic it is in Early Access and they are patching the game constantly. I also highly suggest checking out the doc series from /NoClip. The post Revisiting Hades appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ode to a Smalltown Skater Punk

Tony Hawk in Pretending I’m a Superman
Sometimes you end up with a post stuck in your head that develops a life of its own. Sometimes I veer wildly into territory that I doubt anyone is interested in, and this might go there. The biggest challenge however is I am not even sure how I am going to navigate what I am wanting to talk about. Let’s start with the basics. This weekend I watched an excellent documentary on the making of Tony Hawk Pro Skater called “Pretending I’m a Superman” name from a line in the Goldfinger song Superman. I don’t think it exists on any of the streaming services, and was available for rental for $5 or to purchase for $10 so I just outright purchased it. It was a phenomenal documentary and essentially covers both the evolution of the skate scene and the events that lead to the creation of the Pro Skater franchise, and it’s eventual downfall.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 in all its old-school glory
There are times that I wonder if I am legitimately going through a mid-life crisis. There are times when I get hit so hard by nostalgia that it is almost painful. While I have been messing around with retro consoles lately, this latest venture was triggered by the impending release of a remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. THPS was a very important game for me, but maybe not because of the reasons you might think. I spent a good chunk of my adolescent years as a skater punk, growing up in a very small town without much of a support structure for those sort of en-devours. Thankfully I had a group of about a dozen or so friends who had similar interests at a similar time, but in the pre-internet era we were grossly ignorant about a great many thing.
If not the an exact match, very close in appearance to my first Skateboard
One of the things that you need to be aware of about living in a tiny town prior to the spread of the information super highway is just how small of an existence it was. In a small town in the 80s and early 90s you pretty much had a Dollar General, a Grocery store and if you were exceptionally lucky a Walmart. If something could not be obtained from those locations it was effectively a strange and magical artifact. Weirdly enough my very first skateboard came from the local grocery store and was purchased by me pestering my parents for all of the C&H Greenstamps they had available. I have no clue what the equivalent cost was, but above is an image that if not the same model comes mightily close to my memories of it. It was not a good skateboard, but then again at that point we had no clue what a good skateboard was. My friends had similarly bad skateboards and we thought we were cool. The board lacked a lot of features that you really need to do much with it… namely it was completely flat and had no concavity at all. Second problem it didn’t really have much of a tail, so you were wildly limited in what you could realistically do with it. However it claimed by be a “Ninja” skateboard, which sounded really cool to us at the time. This was apparently a thing because I remember at least two other friends having one branded this, and a few others riding Nash which were at the time equally horrible. The thing I remember the most about it is just how bad the wheels were. They were an exceptionally squishy urethane that picked up every rock and caused you to come skidding to a halt at random.
Thrasher Magazine, a key lifeline of knowledge
Our primary source of information in these early days were horrible movies like the 1986 Josh Brolin vehicle… Thrashin’. The movie did serve a greater purpose however because it introduced us to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers which is a theme that will resurface later. The grocery store news stand infrequently carried the magazine Thrasher, and it was pretty much a race to see who could purchase it before they would ultimately sell out. I had the good luck of being Catholic and our tradition was to go to the Grocery store immediately following Mass, which was a good two hours before anyone else in town would be there. As a result I managed to pick up most of the issues, because the concept of subscribing to a magazine was wildly foreign to any of us.
Santa Cruz Slime Ball wheels
As we came to realize just how bad our skateboards were, we sought a way to improve our lot in life. The friend who could talk his parents into buying him anything had mail order as an option. The rest of us needed a physical location, and at this point the only place any of us knew was Gadzooks. This was located in a mall roughly an hour and a half from our tiny town, and was effectively a clothing store chain. For some reason unbeknownst to any of us, they carried a small stock of decks and various bits needed to make a proper skateboard. While I did not get my first skateboard there, I did manage to talk my parents into a pair of 65 mm Santa Cruz Slime Ball wheels that were neon pink and neon green. While this was largely a stop gap measure because the board itself was still awful, it did go a long ways to making the experience more manageable.
The Skateboards that I owned throughout the years
My first real skateboard came not long after that, but I remember it being a Christmas present. It was however the sort of Christmas present that you know about because you ended up having to pick it out. By then we had found another option for skate equipment in the form of a ski shop called Think Snow. They didn’t have much in the way of stock, but had access to order pretty much anything we could want and I wanted the Jason Jessee Neptune board. I mean your first skateboard is going to be chosen because it has badass graphics right? I also got to pick out a pair of turquoise gullwing trucks to go with it… which I thought looked cool but in hindsight were really poorly designed and lead me to grinding the bolt off. I managed to assemble the rogues gallery that were all of the boards I rode over the years. The first one being of course the Jason Jessee. It had a really shallow tail and nose kick, which lead me to grossly over compensate with the Staab Genie, which was a heavy as fuck monstrosity that was designed for ramp skating. This lead me to over compensate again when I got the Natas which had a really short wheelbase and pretty aggressive nose and tail kicks, but was not really comfortable for my already 6’2″ frame. The Danny Way board was a case of finally choosing a board for how it felt rather than how it looked. Jason Lee was another case of me doing this, even though I did really like the Cat in the Hat artwork. Side note this is in fact the same Jason Lee of Television, Movie and now photographic fame.
Footage from Streets on Fire by Santa Cruz
The biggest challenge by far of being a skater from a small town was the general lack of options for where to skate. I grew up in the country, and since skateboards do poorly on dirt… I spent a lot of time without many options. My dad ran a photography business and when he added a studio onto the house, it included a really nice ADA compliant wheelchair ramp. I spent many an hour riding down that ramp and then trying to bail before falling off when I hit the gravel. The highlight was always when I got to got visit my “city friends” and hang out, but that in itself was its own kind of misery given that our town had an excessive number of brick streets. If you have ever encountered it… apparently at some point in the history of the town we had a famous brick plant and as a result many of our street were never paved over to show this heritage. Given time and as the skateboarding fad spread, we got access to ramps of varying degrees of quality, and I even got a second hand 8 foot tall half pipe which was enjoyable and increased my access to riding more regularly.
Footage from Ban This by Powell Peralta
All of that said there was still a lot of time when riding just wasn’t feasible. At home I had a three-tier giant fingerboard skatepark that I had built out of cardboard, index cards and the barrels of various pens as coping. There were a very small number of Skateboarding games on the NES but between my friends and I we had copies of them all. I spent most of my time playing Skate or Die, but later I got access to the port of Atari’s far superior 720. The other major downtime activity was watching various skate videos that we had somehow acquired. I say somehow acquired because you have to remember, in a small town that which does not come from Walmart does not exist. That said there was a bit of an underground trade in bootleg copies of things that someone at one point legitimately purchased. Anytime something new would enter the system, there would be a sequence of bad copies of copies until practically everyone had access to whatever it was. One of my happy realizations of late is that a lot of these skate tapes have found their way onto YouTube. So now it is entirely possible for me to watch some of my favorites including Streets on Fire by Santa Cruz, Ban This by Powell Peralta, and I even managed to find a copy of the Vision Street Wear US Championships that I can only assume someone originally taped off cable. Side note… most of us had no access to cable television either.
Small towns don’t really have a proper culture of their own, but instead adopt things through whatever means necessary. We didn’t have peers to look up to and show us the ropes. Instead we relied on these videos and the few magazines we could scrounge together. As a result being the impressionable youths that we were, our identities were very confused mirrors of what we had been seeing. We dressed like the skaters we saw dressed. My artwork at the time was deeply influenced by the artwork that adorned the boards and my best friend and I spent countless hours drawing what our boards would look like… you know when we went pro because that was absolutely a thing that was going to happen. Of all of the influences, I would say the biggest for me personally was the music. In a small town we had access to two kinds of music… hair metal and even bigger hair country music. I mean I listened to my fair share of Poison and Def Leppard, but craved something more. These skate tapes had these phenomenal soundtracks from band we had never heard of, and had no clue how to even get access to. I remember pausing the credits to Streets on Fire and scribbling down the name of every band that had been featured. Our little tribe made it a mission to spend birthday and allowance money trying to acquire a trove of this magical stuff. Of course not a damned bit of it was available local, so it would involve frantically scouring the racks of every music store we got access to, but over time through a similar bootleg network we had built up a soundtrack for this shared culture. This lead me down the rabbit hole of labels like SST Records, Epitaph and Sub-Pop and to obscure dives like Mohawk Music that I still miss to this day. This also represents the time when we were heavily listening to bands like Black Flag, DRI, Fugazi, Minutemen, The Descendents and still my favorite of the batch Firehose. Once one person got access to something, it was rapidly spread throughout our burgeoning community, because that is the sort of thing that happens when access to anything “new” is so damned limited.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater Remake
So when I talk about Tony Hawk Pro Skater, it is all of these things that come rushing back to me in their vivid technicolor glory. It has never necessarily been about the specifics of the game, but instead the quirky culture that surrounded my days as a skater. I was never certain what lead me to stop skating, but looking back now I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I spent the majority of my junior year in high school pretty damned ill. I was having black out spells and even managed to very neatly park my car into the ditch during one of them. With this came a fading away from a lot of the people that I had been involved with… I lost my gig as drummer of our band and as that circle of friends made their way into harder and harder drugs I sorta just stayed purposefully distant. Around this same time circumstances lead to us getting our very first computer, a 25 mhz 386 with two whole megabytes of ram, which we eventually upgraded to four. With this my friend group changed as well, as I shifted from Skateboarding as my primary interest to all the things that had taken a backseat. I delved more deeply into pen and paper roleplay and wargaming. I spent more time playing Super Nintendo and then was completely blown away when I got to play Wolfenstein 3D for the first time on the PC. The underground network of acquirers of things shifted from bootleg music and skate videos to bootleg copies of Civilization or Prince of Persia. I still lived in a tiny town and my access to things was just as impossible given that Walmart didn’t start selling anything PC Gaming related until I was in college. After that the come the internet and access to all of that knowledge that I had so desperately been wanting all the years trapped within my tiny confines. I commuted back and forth to junior college for two years, and during that time I was introduced to my wife from a mutual friend from Belgium. This acted as a gateway to meet a lot more denizens of Undernet and ultimately influenced which college I went to, leading us to get together as more than just passing friends. My life changed in a lot of ways rapidly as happens when you graduate high school and move on with living. The truth is I was never a good skater, but I enjoyed it. I could Ollie if somewhat unreliably, and through moments of sheer miracle could occasionally land something like a pop shove it. The truth is among the dozen or so of us in the little tribe… there were maybe three with any real talent that acted as tutors to the rest of us who just enjoyed cruising around and doing simple things like grinding parking blocks. To the best of my knowledge none us actually skated past our senior year. I kept my board in the back of my car for years and through a bit of freak accident wound snapping a truck trying to land a kick flip. I never repaired it after that and as a result it put a somewhat permanent end to my skating days.
Tony Hawk Pro Skater Remake
We are nearing the launch of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 on September 4th, and with it has come this flood of emotions. I have access to the warehouse demo, and it plays just as well as I remember the originals playing. That said none of my feelings are really about the game, and are instead about this fairly important time in my development. Deep inside of me is still buried a little skater punk, and I think this is the era when I developed my deep distrust of authority figures. We went through a period where everyone seemed to be trying to pass ordinances to stop us from having fun, and I got shot at (I think it was just a pellet gun) by a local gas station owner when we rode up to try and buy something out of the pop machine. Nostalgia is a very powerful drug, one which I seem to be deeply susceptible to. I am thankful to this time and the influences it had on my musical tastes. I still get joy by watching those old skate videos, and from time to time I break out a fingerboard with a strong desire to once again build a completely nonsense skate park. For the time being however I will just look forward to the THPS Career Mode and the ability to build and share sweet park designs with my friends online. Like I said at the beginning of this nonsense, this is a post that I felt like I needed to write. I am writing it in large part for myself, but maybe someone out there will get some enjoyment from it as well. I will close by channeling my preteen self that was listening to way too much Exploited… Fuck the police, Skateboarding is not a crime. The post Ode to a Smalltown Skater Punk appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.