Shaun White Snowboarding (Xbox 360)
All the components of a good HD game, save the most important one: fun
11/21/2008 4:46 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2
What's Hot: Lots to explore; Snowball fights; Excellent music
What's Not: Underwhelming tricks and speed; Banal graphics; Buggy online
Worse still, player animations and physics are stiff and unconvincing. Excited to see a crash after a gnarly jump? Don't be. Characters will crumple and roll after a mis-landing like something out of a Nintendo 64 game. It's a shame developer Ubisoft didn't put the processing power of Xbox 360 and PS3 to good use here.
The game looks fine, but there's not much visual variety.
Exclusive to the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game is a 16-person online multiplayer mode. Like in
Burnout Paradise, the transition between single-player and online is near seamless, with real players quickly taking the place of non-playable characters. From there you can join the same competitions, only with real people. Unfortunately -- like in the campaign mode -- there is little direction here, so the experience feels mostly empty, unless you have a group of friends to play with.
Online play is also buggy. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions crashed at least twice apiece on me, and there was some laggy screen-tearing from time to time. At one point, I was unable to enter a lift zone, blocked by an invisible wall at the entrance. I had to restart my session to fix the issue. The crashing didn't render the mode unplayable, but you've been warned.
Plenty of rails and jumps to explore.
On the plus side, Shaun White Snowboarding features an incredibly diverse soundtrack. You'll find a healthy mix of classics, including Blue Öyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper," Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" and Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music," as well as modern favorites like Modest Mouse, Stabbing Westward, MGMT and Audioslave. I even discovered a new personal favorite: "Acceptable in the 80s" by Calvin Harris. Hot.
If you like to explore, there is a lot of landscape at your fingertips (even if it all looks the same), including several designated runs peppered with jumps and rails, backcountry powder, and both man-made and natural half-pipes. But again, getting from point A to point B isn't fun, given the lack of speed and exhilaration in riding the mountain and performing pedestrian tricks. You'll have a much better time with the Wii or PSP versions of the game, despite their smaller scope.
This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
