Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam FIRST LOOK

by: The Ryan September 19 2006

A confirmed launch title for the Nintendo Wii, Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam is a different style of gameplay from any of its previous installments.

But we’re talking about the Nintendo Wii, so of course it’s bound to be different. If you ever indulged in the Tony Hawk series before now you’ve noticed that it’s been packed to the gills with real skaters and impossible tricks. For every Tony Hawk fan that likes that kinda thing, me included, Tony Hawk’s Project 8 is coming out for Xbox, X360, PS2 and PS3.

Tony Hawk’s downhill jam will feature a style of gameplay where you are in a race to get to the bottom of the hill (did you figure that out by the title already?). In Tony Hawk fashion you will have plenty of opportunities to grind and trick your way to the bottom to rack up the high score. The really fun part is that the steering and the use of “turbo” in the game will be controlled by the motion feature of the Wii-mote. You hold the controller like you would a traditional controller, only when you need to turn you simply turn your controller as if you are turning a steering wheel. If you want to get a little boost of speed, you shake the controller towards and away from the screen over and over until your arms get tired or you simply run out of boost power. The controller can also be used to hit your opponents out of the way en route to the finish line. Sort of reminds me a little of the Road Rash series.

The graphics in Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam look to be coming along pretty nicely. While it’s not HD (and please everybody, stop complaining about that), it still has a mighty fine look to it.

I’ll be sure to have more on Downhill Jam as it gets closer to it’s release date.