1080 Snowboarding Impressions: Kind of Awful!
Feb. 1
Do you remember what we got on the Virtual Console two days ago in 2007? This is what we got. Kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Mario Kart 64 AND Contra III, along with two bonus Genesis games. That's four games, two of which are must-buys. Four games. Not two, and not one. Four.
One year later, we can either play a terrible snowboarding game, or we can play nothing. And 1080 Snowboarding is pretty damned terrible. The Internet says it's great. The Internet lies to you. Your own nostalgia may even be lying to you. It's hard to imagine any way in which the creaky old dinosaur game for grandpas, 1080 Snowboarding, is a more worthwhile purchase than the deeper, prettier, more accessible, and even cheaper SSX 3 on the GameCube.
First of all, you can't land your jumps. It's just not possible, at least consistently. Your boarder will trip up and fall on his face almost every time, leaving your opponent to zoom past you. The solution, which is not noted anywhere in the manual, is to tap the L button prior to landing. Not only does this cramp up your hand really fast (considering that you also must hold down L through the entire race, in order to crouch for speed), but landing still seems to work only half the time even if you're doing it correctly. Awesome!
This is kind of a problem in a game that is almost entirely focused on one-on-one races. Tiny mistakes are punished severely, and you can never settle for second place in a race. Either you come in first, or you lose one of three lives. Lose all three lives, and you've lost the circuit and it's back to the title screen. Your AI opponent is a jerk, too, and isn't afraid to take all the shortcuts you haven't memorized yet or bump into you repeatedly to drain your stamina.
It took me over five tries just to get past the first race. Five! And it wasn't even worth the effort, since I was easily beaten in the second race and lost all of my progress.
If you don't feel like being abused by CPU opponents, you can always try suffering through the stiff and unresponsive trick system in Trick Attack, where it's just as difficult to successfully land jumps and score points as it is in any other mode. There's also a barely playable slalom mode, and a two-player option that reduces visibility to a few inches in front of your face.
1080 Snowboarding isn't worth considering as a practical purchase, even if you enjoyed it ten years ago. The GameCube sequel, 1080 Avalanche, is cheaper and (supposedly) better in every way, and it would be hard for any snowboarding game to match the standards set by EA with the SSX series. Seriously, SSX 3 is good stuff. Play it, if you haven't already.
Here's a video of the slalom mode, which also gives a fair demonstration of how much you can expect to struggle with 1080's controls.
Comments
Actually the press-L-to-land IS documented in the manual.
Well hell! Guess I just didn't look hard enough, since I already knew about it from prior research. I still don't like it, though.
Wow, wasn't expecting it to be terrible at all; you'd THINK it'd be somewhat ok since Nintendo developed it! But yeah, I'll definitely look into SSX 3.
The snowboarding genre died with Rare's NES debut, Slalom. So did Rare's ability to make good games, as it happens. The snowboarding genre made a brief comeback with Final Fantasy VII, but you had to play through 3/4ths of a crappy RPG to get to it, so overall I'd say not worth the $150 it grabs nowadays. Turns out retro-gamers REALLY like their snowboarding!
Wow, that looked pretty bad. I watched the Youtube video of slalom and it looked pretty bad. Really choppy gameplay.
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