Eli Hodapp reviews the latest entry in the Tony Hawk game series, “Skate Jam”:

At the end of the day, Tony Hawk’s Skate Jam just looks and feels like a incredibly low-effort reskin of the developer’s other game, Skate Party (Free) (which actually had Mike V. branding until recently) which was another super mediocre skateboarding game on the App Store. It would be easy to say, “Hey, well, whatever, this is the closest we’ll get to a real Tony Hawk game on the iPhone,” but we’ve already had a real Tony Hawk game. Eight years ago. With all the technological advances we’ve seen over the years, it’s baffling that they managed to release a worse game than a hacked together port of a Dreamcast title with, admittedly, very less than ideal virtual controls. I’d suggest just downloading Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 instead, but, well, you can’t.

Another day, another below par freemium iOS game released.

It’s such a pity that these kind of games are the only ones worth releasing on the App Store for game developers these days. Like Eli, I downloaded Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2 on my iPhone all those years ago and loved every minute of it. As has been the trend for a long time on the App Store, it was pulled due to the overhead of keeping it updated in line with iOS.

I’d love to see some sort of mechanism built into iOS to allow older, no longer supported games to be ran on the latest iOS versions in some form of emulator. That would at least guarantee that older games would not dissapear without a trace just a few short years after release.