Tony Hawk: Shred

Just as with RIDE, the Wii edition of Shred was handled by a different studio than the version for the major consoles - while Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 got Shred from Robomodo, the Wii version was again completed by the Buzz Monkey team, which had already worked on the specifics of Nintendo hardware for the previous installment. Both disciplines, skateboarding and the newly added snowboarding, are controlled with the same physical board as in the previous title, but the Wii variant of the peripheral and its motion sensing differ from the version for other consoles just as they did with RIDE.

The most noticeable difference from the Xbox 360 edition is in character personalization: instead of Xbox Live avatars, the Wii version supports Mii characters that the player created directly on the Nintendo console, making it a visually different experience tailored to the platform's ecosystem. The rest of the content - both skate and snowboard tracks - is shared by the Wii edition with the rest of the series; it differs mainly in this layer of personalization, in the board's behavior, and in the absence of online features, which neither the Wii version of RIDE nor Shred ever offered.

With Shred, Buzz Monkey thus continued exactly what it had done with RIDE - adapting the same board to the weaker Wii hardware and replacing online features with local personalization via Mii. The combination of both modes, skate and snowboard, also turns out differently on Wii because the board's motion sensing reacts to the wider arcs of snowboarding with different sensitivity than on more powerful consoles, which also affects how accurately the game recognizes individual tricks. For fans of the Nintendo console, Shred thus remains the only way to experience both disciplines with a board adapted specifically to their hardware.

Why play: The Wii edition of Shred makes sense for players who want to combine the skate and snowboard experiment from RIDE with their own Mii character and a physical board adapted specifically to this console, instead of the Xbox avatars from the competing version by the same development team.