The soundtrack for the latest sequel in the Tony Hawk franchise includes Metallica and Frank Sinatra, and the gameplay in Tony Hawk's Underground 2 is all over the map, too. Its Classic mode keeps a tight focus on skating and stylishly executing combos, using some of the levels and goals from earlier Tony Hawk games. But the Story mode's gleefully cartoonish World Destruction Tour is more likely to remind gamers of Grand Theft Auto or Burnout 3.
Here, players compete in eight settings, running up point totals while causing as much mayhem as possible. Between jumps and grabs, you need to perform destructive stunts -- say, rail over cannons to make them shoot or spray-paint graffiti all over the city. The part where we had to steal a gurney from a hospital so the sick kid could meet Tony Hawk was cheesy, but we liked it anyway. The World Destruction Tour, alas, ends a bit quickly; we completed it in seven hours. Two new gameplay modes, Elimiskate and Scavenger Hunt, round out the action.
| | | | ___Personal Tech E-letter___ Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro answers reader e-mail and expands on themes he touches on in his weekly newspaper column. The e-mail version of this weekly feature includes links to the latest gadget and software reviews.
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Smooth player animations, seamless transitions and a brighter, deeper color scheme help this game jump off the screen, especially in the Windows version. PS2 and PC online gameplay is a bonus.
-- Tom Ham
Win Me or newer, $40; PlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube, $50
NISUS WRITER EXPRESS 2.0, Nisus Software
Downloading this Mac word-processing program costs $59, while the cheapest you can find Microsoft Word is $149 (the Student and Teacher Edition price that pretty much any home user qualifies for). That price includes the rest of Microsoft's Office suite -- but if, like many home users, you make little use of spreadsheet or presentation software, Microsoft is basically charging more than twice as much for its writing program. So opting for Nisus Writer Express can make financial sense.
It also makes aesthetic sense. Solana Beach, Calif.-based Nisus aimed to match the streamlined elegance of Mac OS X itself, and it shows. Nisus Writer Express presents customizable editing and formatting controls in a toolbar across the top and a slide-out menu on the side of each document's window instead of being buried under menus and submenus. A PowerFind feature allows for detailed searching -- for instance, it can be set to locate only phone numbers or particular patterns of text. A set of prerecorded macro scripts automates such tasks as adding line numbers and removing blank lines. Unfortunately, you can't record a macro and instead must write it in Nisus's script syntax.
Since we live in such a Microsoft world, Nisus Writer Express has to open and save documents in Word format reliably; fortunately, it does this well. The one thing it can't do that Word can is desktop publishing, since Nisus Writer's basic page-layout capabilities don't go far beyond putting multiple columns on a page. Nisus Writer also lacks some of Word's specialized editing tools, such as its revision tracking and built-in dictionary. But otherwise, it's close enough to Word to make a switch easy for Mac users unhappy with Word but unsatisfied by Apple's aging AppleWorks.
-- Anthony Zurcher
