Top 1 Xbox 360 Site

For the first time ever, Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland gives players the freedom to experience continuous skating and BMX biking action without leaving the game or waiting for load times as they explore and choose missions in a massive, living Los Angeles skate world.

Genre: Extreme Sports

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Neversoft Entertainment

Online Play: 8 Versus/ 2 Co-op

Local Play:

November 15, 2005 –
With what is essentially the third “reinvention” of the series, Pro Skater being the first and Underground being second, Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland sees the series shy away from the unfettered destruction focus of the last two games and head back to its pure skateboarding roots. In fact, the game’s story mode is based around old-school skaters, building a skatepark from the ground up and basically earning everything from scratch.

360 Degrees of Tony

Let’s go ahead and get the Xbox 360 specifics out of the way. The first thing you should know is that, as its name would suggest, this is the exact same game that you’ll find on the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. Unlike what happened when Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 was designed for the PS2, and the PSOne release was a massively stripped-down version of the PS2 game, the game’s content is identical across both console generations.

The level layouts are exactly the same, which is fine because they’re pretty good. The geometric detail that makes up said levels is identical as well, so even though the game is on a much more powerful system on the Xbox 360, you’re still working with the same amount of raw polygon data.

The only real upgrades you’ll see in the game at all, content or graphics-wise, are better textures, a subtle bit of normal mapping and a tad bit better lighting effects. The most obvious difference is the resolution of the textures. We’re not saying they’re as detailed as some other games we’ll see on the system, but there’s a pretty reasonable difference between, say, the original Xbox and Xbox 360 versions. The street texture for one looks quite a bit better, and you’ll notice that ramps and sidewalks have more defined cracks and joints. The subtle bit of normal mapping is best seen on the skaters, where you can make out pants pockets, shirt wrinkles and those sorts of details. Again, it’s subtle, but it’s nice. You’ll also see what looks like a bit of normal mapping happening on some of the ramps and such in the game, like bricks for instance, but the effect is so minor that it’s hard to make out whether it’s an advanced lighting technique or just nice texture work.