Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3

aka: THPS3
Moby ID: 5279
PlayStation Specs
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Description official descriptions

Tony Hawk returns with an all new line-up of skaters, an all new line-up of parks to crash through, and a whole new level of graphics.

The line-up of street and vert riders include Elissa Steamer, Jamie Thomas, Steve Caballero, Rune Glifberg, Geoff Rowley, Andrew Reynolds, Rodney Mullen, Eric Koston, Chad Muska, Bucky Lasek and Bam Margera from MTV's Jackass (and Tony Hawk, of course).

The create a skater mode returns, allowing for even further levels of options for your character, like adding glasses and tatoos to changing the colour of the knee and elbow pads or even the hair.

And the levels themselves that you must skate through are now more interactive, with cars and humans blocking paths and making noise as you race around to make as many points as possible. Use items around the streets or the park to jump from or over to increase your score, and pull of as many wild and wacky tricks as you can.

Spellings

  • 托尼霍克职业滑板3 - Chinese spelling (simplified)

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Credits (PlayStation version)

228 People (155 developers, 73 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 75 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 166 ratings with 6 reviews)

Quite possibly the best PS2 game yet.

The Good
I loved everything about this game.

Graphics: The graphics are top notch, with hardly any visible abnormalities. The character's actions are smooth and crips, and the animation and transition from trick to trick is nice and lifelike.

Control: Never has skateboarding been easier to control. Four buttons can land you hundred thousand point combos. Grinding a rail, doing a grab, everything is simple, yet elegant.

Difficulty: Challenging for beginners to the game, like myself (I played THPS2, but not too much).

Replay Value: High! Each level has multiple things to unlock, and when you've completed all the goals, you still have to unlock all the different boards (about eight per skater), find the hidden areas and grab the Stat points.

Multiplayer: THPS3 is the first PS2 game to go online, and it does a good job of it. If your a rookie to computers (the technical side), you might have difficulty setting up the network, but the manual explains it quite well. There is nothing like playing a game of Slap! with three other people, trying to see who can knock down each other the most.

The Bad
The difficulty of the game might be easy to veterans of the games. The manual and grind balance meters have been tweaked so it's easy to maintain longer grinds and manuals without too much movement.

The Bottom Line
If you want a fun game that'll last a while and can play with others without a split screen, this game will be good for you.

PlayStation 2 · by JPaterson (9502) · 2001

It's fast, it's fun - it's Tony Hawk!

The Good
Everything! It has really great, detailled graphics which are still fast in high resolutions. The controls are easy to learn if you use a game pad (any with 4 buttons will do, I use a very old cheap pad which works surprisingly well). The music (rap and crossover from numerous well-known and not-so-well-known bands) fits the game absolutely and really makes you feel like you're skating in front of some friends while the ghetto-blaster is roaring :)

All the good skaters are there - except Bob Burnquist who got booted because he sponsors his own game now - and they really are different. Tony Hawk is a really good skater and can do almost everything; Elissa Steamer for example is not bad (she wouldn't show up here if she were) but she's a damn slow girl. And the skaters's animations! They look really realistic, as they do since the first Tony Hawk game but this time they got even smoother.

There are so many tricks a skater can do (and they are different for each skater) that it needs some time to just do them all. And then, in each level are so many gaps or tricks you can do to get a huge score, you really need even more time to discover them. Talking of levels, they are big, detailled and this time full of life. People walk around, cursing at you if you run them over, cars drive (over you if you won't pay attention), other skaters demanding you to "pull some tricks" or making photos of you... Not to mention the intelligent tasks you have to fulfill on every stage. There are 9 of them and while most are just achieving a high, higher and even higher score, they now included a bit more complicated stuff like impressing five skaters with your tricks or drowning a worker in a pool of water :)

The Bad
It has some bugs, like your skater's legs disappearing in the ground, getting stuck when making tricks on a ramp etc. Many clipping errors, too (you can sometimes see secret rooms trough walls). But that's not that bad, you can easily cope with them since they don't appear too often. Sometimes, the sound effects are silent while the music still plays.

The keyboard controls are totally unusable.

The Bottom Line
If you like skateboarding you need this game anyway. But if you don't like it too much (like me), but want a fast, action-packed game with lots of cool stuff to perform, it's still the right one. A really great game, but I didn't expect less from a Tony Hawk game.

Windows · by phlux (4295) · 2002

Extreme Fun Addictive

The Good
I am a strategy/simulation lover and i didn't expect to like THPS3 so much but man, this is great... I had been playing for four or five months and i am still going on. I just love it.

I keep discovering ways to score higher and higher and the feel to get a good combo without bailing or meeting the floor is cool.

Vert and street skaters will find on THPS3 a good simulator with plenty of possibilities.

The Multiplayer feature made the replay value higher and u will find that the people out there are really on big leagues...

The Bad
Not much but...

A few graphics issue that should be fixed and don't look good on a 2002 release and lack of scenarios in my opinion

The Bottom Line
I am sure that every skater owns this title on his/her collection so i will give my opinion to non-skaters like me.

At a first look you will find it pretty... hmmm... lets say... "Made for teens" but believe me this one is a very complex sport simulator and the challenge will be high for most gamers. Try it if u can.

Windows · by Cabeza2000 (689) · 2003

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Dreamcast question. Zaibatsu (20100) Jun 18, 2013
Xbox 360 compatibility Ace of Sevens (4479) Sep 24, 2007

Trivia

Nintendo 64 version

The N64 version was the last American release for the system.

References

Dark Lord of the Sith himself, Darth Maul, is a secret character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. LucasArts officially licensed the character to Activision for the game. Activision, you might remember, published Star Wars: Demolition.

UFOs

  • In Tony Hawk's movie, when he does the 900 you can see a UFO in the background.
  • In Rodney Mullen's movie, when he does the truckstand near those people in deckchairs if you look closely you will see that the people are actually aliens.

Version differences

The PC and Xbox versions contain exclusive unlockable content. The Xbox has an skeleton named bones and an oil rig level (which was latter retooled and used in Tony Hawk's American Wasteland). The PC has Doomguy as a playable skater.

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – PS2 Sports Game of the Year
    • 2001 – GameCube Sports Game of the Year
    • 2001 – Best Online Multiplayer Game of the Year (PlayStation 2 version)
    • 2002 – PC Sports Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)

Information also contributed by Ace of Sevens, Dracula Marth and James Isaac

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Macintosh, Nintendo 64 added by Corn Popper. Windows added by phlux.

Additional contributors: Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, phlux, James Isaac, Zeppin, DreinIX, Patrick Bregger.

Game added November 5, 2001. Last modified March 11, 2024.