October 22nd, 2001 Well fellow game fans, it's been awhile since I wrote, and that's because I have been absolutely up to my rectangular pupils beta testing some hot new Gameboy Advance [GBA] action!!! Today's article will focus around a very hot new cart from Troy, NY based development firm, Vicarious Visions, makers of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 for the GBA. It doesn't take a Screenwriter's Guild dropout to know that when your product's version 1 tops the charts, you make a version 2. And what do you do when version 2 blows out of stores even faster than version 1? Why, you look your gift horse in the mouth of course. You throw caution (in the form of money) to the wind. You bet the farm. Simply put, you make a version 3, and hope to God it won't drag your glorious empire into crumbling ruins. Well that's just what Vicarious Visions, under the government of The Kingdom of Tony Hawk did recently when they paid a whole lotta people to make Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 for the GBA. You might be wondering if it's as good as it's prequels. Let's find out! Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3: Preview By Gary '86 the Designers Choose between 4 interplanetary species What's left to design, right? They've already fairly well perfected the pre-rendered, seemingly fully rotatable characters. They've got the whole control thing down to a science - it's almost easier to control than the Playstation versions. As far as the backgrounds, they've nailed the whole isometric perspective idea down. Esentially, any monkey with 3D Studio Max and an infinite number of fingers could add to the already existing THPS engine with no problem at all. So where am I going with this? I'm trying to tell you there are no more designers. They axed all of 'em, and left the fate of the GBA THPS series in the hands of the programmers alone. The design office is amazing now - everyone coming in with black tshirts that say "Wherever you go, there you are," greeting each other with Vulcan gestures, then giggling in a really non-Vulcan fashion. They all wear gladiator helmets or vampire costumes, and there's just a general crazy fun-time Dungeons & Dragons attitude that seems to relate in no way whatsoever to the skateboarder lifestyle at large. New Insanely Intelligent Cheat Modes With the "Sands of Time" cheat mode enabled, all portions of the screen go into a state of constant temporal flux With so many positions now "open" at Vicarious Visions, and a whole new design paradigm well under way, a flood of new applicants poured in from every corner. Most of these applications came from disgruntled scientists who couldn't land new grants for their intense research after they had used up their old grants with no results. The result of this influx of ultra-smarties to the design team has lead to some gameplay enhancements that border on, and sometimes cross straight over into the realm of Nobel Prize candidacy. Advancements in quantum probability, inverse-causality, and neurophysical statistical analysis have given birth to a game cartridge that for the most part is 10 to 15 times more intelligent than the average person playing the game. A perfect example, illustrated above-left, is the "Sands of Time" cheat mode, wherein portions of the screen go into temporal flux in both directions of the current present time. This means that by entering portions of the screen at the right moment, you're actually able to send messages to your past self which can lead to better scores on a nearly exponential level. Oops, you fell! No problem, get up, slip into a 30-second backward pocket of space-time, hop twice (or whatever you pre-deemed an appropriate warning symbol), and suddenly, you didn't fall! Your 30-seconds ago you got the message in time and frontside nollie nosegrinded instead of fatally backside fakie boardsliding. Score! Slip into another pocket of space-time and give a quick 360° kickflip to signal your future self of your joint triumph! We at misinformer were just blown away that a group of MIT scientists would leave their time-travel theses to be a part of a video game's gameplay, but who are we to complain? This cheat rocks! New Enemies (besides just more gravity!) It will be up to the rest of the game's skaters to avenge this untimely death EVERYTHING and everyone is an enemy now. We're not really sure if this is a just for added challenge, or if the nerds making this new cart have some deep-seated issues. Either side of the coin though, misinformer.com is gonna be on its toes about this for a long time. When a player dies in THPS3, that's it. They're dead. You have to deal with the loss, choose another player, and move on. With realistic decay rates, you may choose to avoid a particular level for a least a week after the body becomes lifeless. If you're a sick bastard, you may decide to have a little fun and re-enter the level with a new boarder to catch some sic kickflips over, or some 50-50 boardslides right across the rotting carcass. When I said that everything is an enemy now, I mean it. The image above left isn't from me tripping and falling. I was shot. I don't know why or where from, but earlier in the level I had done a wall ride off of a pretty mean looking group of thugs in the lower left area of that level. I think maybe they got angry, but I'll never know, because I was shot from the shadows. Cowards... Play in Source Code Mode, and even Binary! playing in pure binary not for the feint of heart No journey into hackerland would be complete with getting to play this cartridge in its purest forms. You can choose to play directly in Source Code Mode, Assembly Mode, Hex Mode, and even pure Binary Mode! How does that work? Well, you'd better be a speed reader, that's for sure. "Source" being the easiest of the 3, you watch as the actual high-level programming language that makes the game work in the first place flips back and forth in front of your eyes. You still play the same way, but instead of seeing the graphics, you see the code that's being executed to create those graphics. When you get down to the binary side of things, you don't see the binary of the code being executed, just the binary output to the screen. It would be ridiculous otherwise, right? That's all I'm saying... So far, no one on Earth has been able to effectively score more than a handful of points in any of these modes, and even then they don't know how or why, but the programmers of these modes remain confident that "someone out there must have just enough midichlorians in their blood to pull off this monumental task, and when he/she/they finally surface(s), the world will belong to US!" Conclusions THPS3 for the GBA, in our opinion, is as good as any third version of anything, including Superman III, The Neverending Story III, and the upcoming Speed III. Nevertheless, we're sending our copy to the FBI and locking our doors.