Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam

While the home consoles got their version of Downhill Jam from Toys for Bob, the portable edition for the Nintendo DS was made by a completely different studio, Vicarious Visions, and it shows at first glance. The game runs on its own 3D engine with noticeably cel-shaded, comic-book-style graphics that differ significantly from the blockier look of the home versions, and it was among the titles that showed at the time what Nintendo's handheld could do with fully three-dimensional tracks – the DS screen back then usually saw more 2D or simpler 3D projects.

Besides the graphics, the content differs too: according to period descriptions, the DS tracks are considerably larger than in the previous game in the series for this console, and the game keeps the traditional button-based trick controls instead of the tilt gesture from the Wii version, so it plays completely differently in terms of controls as well. The trick system also got tweaks – flip tricks can now be held like grab tricks, and the revert was removed from the game, while the bert slide was, according to period reviews, adjusted specifically for downhill riding. As one of the few titles in the series at the time, the game also offered online multiplayer races via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service, something the home versions don't have at all.

Vicarious Visions had worked on portable Tony Hawk games for a long time, going back to earlier entries in the series for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, so Downhill Jam wasn't their first attempt at preserving the feel of a console game on a small screen. Thanks to that, the DS version doesn't feel like a hastily thrown-together add-on to the home editions, but like a well-thought-out handheld interpretation of the same concept, which, thanks to its online races and its own engine, kept its own identity even among the other versions of the game released the same year.

Why play it: The DS edition will appeal to players who want to see how differently another studio handled the same subject on different hardware – with its own graphics, adjusted controls, and online races that the home versions of Downhill Jam didn't offer at all, which made the handheld edition a distinctive title rather than just a shrunk-down port.