Game #1123: Tony Hawk's Motion

 And you thought 5 was bad....

 While your mileage may vary on how good the latter Tony Hawk games were, there's no denying that 5 marked an all time low.... or did it? Well, Tony Hawk's Motion released a few years before, and it seems it went under the radar because this is easily worse than 5 in every way.

 There's a gimmick to this game: It comes bundled with a motion cart that you insert in the original DS' GBA port. Yup, this means that most DS systems can't play this game, and in an ironic twist of fate, that might be a good thing. This motion pack is how you play the game, basically, you must tilt the entire system to move your skater. Somebody thought this was a good idea. Somebody was an idiot.

 So... I could complain about the fact that half of this game's stages are snowboard stages. I could. But then again, I could complain about the fact that the game only has a pathetic grand total of four levels, two skating and two snowboarding. I could. I could mention how piss-poor the character creator is or how ugly the character model is. But why bother with all of that if the game itself is pretty much unplayable because of how awful the motion sensor is?

 And they knew how bad it was because most of the time there are not 'goals'. Stages have about 6 challenges, 5 not counting Free Ride, and they don't have set goals. In Score Session you must score as much as you can before time is up, but you don't need to hit any threshold. In Hawkman challenges you must collect green pellets and avoid red pellets, once again, it doesn't matter how much you score. It doesn't matter on ANY of the challenges. Bah! Rail Hopper, the hardest challenges in the game in which you must grind from one end of a stage to the other, do have a failure state if you fall over five times. But that challenge aside, any points you manage to gather are enough.

 And the problem is that moving left and right using motion just doesn't work. Either it's too sensitive or not sensitive enough, and the timing for tricks is way more lenient, making it very hard to bail a trick, because of how unwieldy it is. In a way, having so little content, barely an hour's worth, is a blessing in disguise.

 Alongisde the main game, there's an alternate, kiddy game called 'Hue Pixel Painter'. It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with Tony Hawk, but it's more fun. I had to tinker with the motion sensitivity, but once I hit a sweetspot(I had to make it very sensitive) it became playable. Basically, you must stomp on a color fountain, and then go from color blot to color blot under a small time limit. It's silly, it's fun for about 5 minutes, but even so, it's the only passable thing about this cart.

 Absolutely terrible. There's barely any game here, and what little there is is nigh unplayable. Absolute garbage.

 0.5