I’ve recently playing a ton of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a combined remake of the first two games of the series from the PS1 era. And it’s pretty good. I spent a lot of my youth playing these games so I am a prime target and for once they managed to capture the old, arcade-y feel without overdoing it like some of the later titles in the series did, all the levels look great and feel good to skate in, though I think they overdid the stuff a bit that some things kind of go missing in the textures, which is particularly noticeable in the Venice Beach level.
I played these games so much in my youth that I basically speedran them without knowing what speedrunning was. What I mean is that you had to complete each objective (collecting SKATE, finding the secret tape, high scores, etc.) with each Skater to unlock their video, and in certain early levels such as Hangar I could do the entire list in a 2 minute session. This however has gone by the wayside here. You only need to collect each objective once to unlock levels, and the levels stay unlocked for any skater. You still have to visit each level to collect the stat points for the skaters, but instead of having to do all the challenges, each skater (and the game overall) has a list of challenges to unlock additional deck graphics or outfits and gain money to to buy other stuff, including objects for the park creator tool. Some of these are tied to the objectives i.e. collecting medals, and hitting the “sick” scores in levels with that skater.
Speaking of medals: I either lost a lot of my skill in the intervening years, or these competition levels are a lot harder than they used to be. I am having an extremely hard time getting gold medals, and lost the gold in the last run more than I care to remember already. Some of the challenges also feel very hard and are kind of very obtuse in their restrictions.
Finally, I am very happy that they basically kept the entire soundtrack intact. THPS1 was a foundational piece in forming my musical taste. As far as I could find, only three songs from the original games are missing, and they added 30+ additional songs from a bunch of bands that I actually rather like, such as Screaming Females, Strung Out, Reel Big Fish, FIDLAR, A Tribe Called Quest, and Billy Talent. The only problem is that some of the songs are pretty heavily censored, particularly noticeable with Police Truck which is a rather offensive song (and intended to be).