Tuesday 06 Jan 2009

Any serious boarder will tell you that snowboarding is more about lifestyle than it is about sport. Any gamer will tell you that good snowboarding games are more about fun than about lifestyle…and this is where Shaun White Snowboarding (SWS) misses the slopes.

I would say that SWS has been dealt a terrible hand in that it was guided in a direction by us, the gamers, with another franchise that was given glory by creating new methods within the extreme sports arena: SKATE. Bear with me for a minute. SKATE was released when the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise turned all Jackass on us all and lost its appeal. Along came EA and brought with it a more serious aspect to the sport with your analogue sticks mimicking the movement that your feet would recreate on a real skateboard – upping the realism and throwing out the arcade roots while they were at it. The game is now rated the best skateboarding game out there and Tony Hawk’s franchise has pretty much been dethroned.

If one had to find a snowboarding game in the same sense as the Tony Hawk franchise (with a snowboarding theme) then SSX would be that game…only EA (surprisingly) has not milked the title beyond recognition and it is still heralded as the snowboarding game to beat. 1080° Snowboarding might have a more “race” approach, but it still can’t touch SSX. Earlier in this generation we saw Amped released on the 360 to meet a similar fate and now we see Shaun White Snowboarding doing the same thing. Simulation snowboarding does not work as it would for Skateboarding.

You start off by creating your own character and then equip your board, jacket, goggles and several other aspects. Once that is done you are thrown right in the middle of a very basic tutorial. It’s as if they accepted that you have played several snowboarding games before as the tutorial is very shallow. Once you are given the lowdown, it is on to the mountains. SSX 3 is probably a good example of a great way to progress in a game – start on a small mountain and once mastering that you open the medium mountain and later the large mountain, increasing in difficulty as you plod along. In Shaun White Snowboarding you are given all four mountains from the word go (Japan, Europe, Alaska, Park City). It really feels as if you have absolutely nothing to achieve, even though there are events set up on each mountain…there is nothing more for you to open, you already have all the mountains to yourself and this completely lacks any kind of structure.

When it comes to the handling of your snowboard they have gone for the SKATE formula where you steer your character with the left analogue stick and pull off your tricks with the right stick. It just does not work! The press of a button is so much quicker and in mid air it is very time consuming to change tricks with the analogue stick and it is not precise anyway. Railing is just as annoying, it’s hard enough to estimate your jump to land on the rail and then to be given a balance meter which slips from left to right faster than Darkwing Duck slips on a banana. They really could have been more generous in that department. I avoided the rails as much as possible which in return meant I really struggled building up any kind of combos in events.

The game looks the part in the sense of “snow looks like snow” but it also feels very bland and exceptionally white (no, I’m not promoting his surname anymore!). Even the areas that are made specifically to do tricks on are so boring.

What is good about this game? Well, it has a decent soundtrack with AudioSlave and Heart suiting this lifestyle and you get to throw snowballs at other boarders for absolutely no reason but your own cynical enjoyment. The four mountains are quite big, so if you are desperate for another snowboarding game then this will suffice. However, if you are after a game that you want to enjoy, that drives you to be competitive and most importantly brings the gamer out in you then this is not for you. Rather opt for SSX Blur on the Wii or SSX3 on the PS2, GameCube or Xbox. This is no White Knights tale (oh there I go again!)

Pros: Decent soundtrack; you can throw snowballs…errr…yeah.

Cons: No structure; boring and bland environments; too realistic.

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Contributor:	Dawid

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