GuttersnipeXL

I just bought Underground 2 the other day. It's pretty good, they put some good cities to skate in it. I thought it was pretty easy to beat though, it seems like they could have made things a bit more difficult. I'm still missing a ton of gaps so I'm still playing it. Anyone else playing this one? Do you like it, how would you rate it against the original THUG?

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When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. HST

Stompy

I'm playing through it now. It's pretty much identical to the first, IMO. Not much has changed aside from the story line and the ability to do a "sticker plant". You can tag things up, too.

The sticker plant is good because it allows for perpetual combo chains, haha (more "spring" than the wall plant).

THPS becomes a skill that sticks with ya through life, though. It took me a while to beat the first two, but after I played them so damn much, I beat ALL the others with ease. Even the pro-challenges in 4 were cake. I liked the "sick" mode that THUG introduced.

They're gonna have to start comin up with something more innovative, I think, because if you're a seasoned veteran, there's almost no challenge to these games.

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I love lamp.

Echodork

I thought that the stat-boost challenges in THUG 1 were pretty much cake... I had almost maxed my stats in the first level just by tricking around. The challenges in THUG 2 are no joke, at least on sick mode. You need to bust a three million point combo to max out one of your stats (speed? air? I forget). You have to do 25 flip tricks in the same combo to max out Flip. I have yet to max any of my stats, and I've been playing it a while.

THUG 2 introduced a lot of new elements, but most of them are pretty minor. You can back/front/sideflip as part of your air tricks now (and while you're doing other tricks). You can sticker plant, and you can Natas Spin on posts and fire hydrants. There's Focus Mode, where you slow down time to increase your grind/manual balance. You can swap out with pro skaters and hidden characters, most of which are sorta cheesy but fun to use. There's both Story Mode and Classic Mode, where you have 2:00 to accomplish goals like in the previous games.

All in all, THUG 2 feels like a solid culmination for the series. It has all the best parts of the previous games (the training level is an exact replica of The Warehouse from THPS 1), and the controls have been finely tuned for good gameplay. Buy THUG 2 not because it does anything NEW, but because it does everything RIGHT.

Derwood

I still can't get past the damned timed "chase Eric" level at the end of THUG 1. I come close, but I just turn retarded on that level, don't know why.

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"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

Kadath

I was a complete lunatic for THPS2, and I got so I could play the game in the little PIP window while my roommates watched tv on the main screen. Then I got THPS3 and handled that easily, but I lost interest after that. It just looks like the same stuff over and over, and it's rare for me to play more than two games in a series with such little innovation from title to title.

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it's quiet in here

Tusko

i've always perferred the original tony hawk games. (the first 2 were the best)

everything after that, just got silly. And THUG just lost me any reason to play.

hulk

I managed everything on the insane difficulty, except this. I hated it. So I played through on Too Easy and skipped it next time on Insane

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.

Stompy

The trick is in grinding. I've never EVER focused on air/lip tricks in any THPS game - there's no point value in em.

What you need to do is find a perpetual grind line. *Every* level has one. Set ALL of your specials to grind moves, and execute away. 3 million points, using that method, is cake.

What you do is just grind, as you're grinding, jump and flip, land w/ another grind. Repeat. When your special meter is full, land nothing but grind specials. Watch how fast your points/tricks rack up.

For example... Moscow in THUG, you can seriously just loop around the middle of the level (up on the bridge/tower-like structures) forever. My highest is.. probably like 10 million on that.

Or in the airport in THPS3 where the escalators are around the baggage claim, you can have a perpetual combo around something like that. I think I hit like 20-30 million on that one.

You skill many birds with one stone this way.

1. Constant grind to fill the "grind for x seconds" goal
2. Many many flip tricks to cover the "25 flips"
3. If there's a manual/caveman in the grind line, covers those

So on, so forth.

Personally, I think they should add an "extreme" mode.. one above "sick"

Maybe something like "Get 1 million points with just manual tricks" (like pogo hopping, etc..) that'd be a good challenge.

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I love lamp.

hulk

Goal creator is your friend

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.

Echodork

Actually, I was able to smash the 3M point trick once I figured out a really easy way to do it. There are three trick types that you can tweak out... grinds, lip tricks, and manuals (flatlands). Tweaking gives you a ridiculous amount of points compared to fliptrick-grinding, because it's so easy to advance your multiplier and do a ridiculous number of tricks. So what I did for the 3M trick was start out with a Freak Out, got some speed and started grinding a perpetual ledge, and tweaked my grind as many times as I could. Then I jumped, manualed to a nearby quarterpipe, lip tricked it, and started tweaking lip tricks. When I was done with that, I dropped, popped a revert, did a manual special and let it ride for a while, then started tweaking flatland tricks. I tried it first on easy mode, and my trick multiplier was something over 40 or 50, I forget exactly. I did something like this when playing Trick Attack in 2P, and ended up beating a friend of mine something like 4M to 500k.

On Sick mode, the multipler caps at 27.5 (I think? Doesn't it?). In that case, the best way to get the points is to cap the multipler, then land a special manual/lip/grind and let it ride so you accumulate raw points as fast as possible.

Anyway, great game, I skipped THPS 3 and 4 because they were too similar to the second one, but Underground is polished enough that I can come back and enjoy the series again.