Nostalgia Highway - Shaun White Snowboarding
Today we take a gentle cruise down Nostalgia Highway to have a look at Shaun White Snowboarding.
Since this is the first issue of Nostalgia Highway I thought I might explain what it is. The premise of the series is for me to pick a game that I remember playing years ago, explain what I remember of it, and then see if they are actually any good. I might have had terrible taste when I was younger, so there is no guarantee that the titles I write about is any good. Wouldn’t this be fun though? Re-discovering old games that are hopefully as good as I remember them (but probably not). I at least think so and therefore want to share the exploration and thoughts of my childhood games.
Shaun White Snowboarding may not sound like a particularly old title as it was released in late 2008. Time flies however, and being almost 9 years since release it is by no means a new game, which resulted in nostalgia kicking in when I remembered the game again. Thinking back I got reminded of the satisfaction of carving down the massive mountains, doing huge flips and the spins. I remember a world where there was always something to do, a new cliff, jump, or rail following the other. I even have fond memories the in-game music as I discovered two great band from this game, one of them being a favorite band of mine. Now the question that follows is, is the game actually as good as I remember it?
When first sitting down and going down the first mountain I thought it was great, the sounds, the map and the feel of it all took me back. It didn’t however take too long however before this feeling was disrupted, firstly because of the horrible keyboard controls that resulted in me quickly switching to a controller, my new Xbox One S controller in fact which is fantastic by the way. Yet even then the controls are not as precise as they should be, often resulting in the character not doing what I want. And secondly by what has to be some of the most cringeworthy lines ever written.
A central issue in Shaun White Snowboarding, following the Ubisoft trend (or rather preceding), is technical problems. The biggest of them all is the fact that it doesn’t support CPUs with hyperthreading, meaning that it did not work on my desktop, it did however run on my laptop for some reason, which is strange considering that too has hyperthreading enabled. Other issues and annoyances I encountered while playing are things like texture flickering, objects with way too big hitboxes, invisible walls, and getting stuck in terrain. The latter being being quite annoying when doing one of the many challenges around the mountain.
There are a quite a few various types of challenges, most of them being quite enjoyable but not all however. The one I dislike the most is the one called Death Race. It is as you might have guessed a race, the “death” part comes from the fact that you can throw snowballs at your opponents and they can throw at you. First of all, I find it rather inconsistent that you land perfectly after a fifty meter tall drop, but getting hit by a snowball in the back and you fall head first into the snow. I would however tolerate this fact if the addition of the snowball mechanic made it more enjoyable, but it only makes it more frustrating. Reason being that you need to hold down the button for almost ten seconds to “lock on”, and even if you manage to dodge them they screw up your balance resulting in decreased speed and handling. It is simply a horribly implemented gameplay mechanic.
At the topic of gameplay, I would call it rather... unstable. Sometimes it feels pretty great, controls being relatively responsive and I’m getting a sense of speed, other times however it is dreadful. Speed is a key point here as it seems more or less random to how fast you are actually going. There are what seems like random speed boosts and decreases for no apparent reason, sometimes from simply jumping on a rail. This is excruciatingly annoying when dealing with a mentioned race where even if I use the fastest board available and goes perfectly through a corner, I still find the AI rushing past me at twice the speed. Another problem comes from the fact that you are automatically attracted to rails. While this works fine for the most part it does get a bit irritating when it leads to you going head first into it.
The by far weakest aspect of the game (albeit probably the least important) is its “story”. The whole plot is that you are a “new snowboarder in town” and you are for some reason discovered by the one and only Shaun White. He sees potential in you and gives you a quest. What is this magnificent quests you might ask? Well going around collecting Euros of course, 12 of them! The reason presented for doing this is so that Shaun can take you to Europe. Problem is that these 12 coins is scattered all over the four different destinations of the game, making it feel rather pointless for Mr. White to take you somewhere you have already been. This process is then repeated with three times with other types of coins, only difference being that you gain this “focus” that gives you special powers like speed and jump boost.
The focus ability makes for some enjoyable moments, at least in the later stages of the game. It is however far from perfect as it runs out way too fast and recharges way too slowly, thereby limiting its use for only a small percentage of the playtime. What I would love to see in such feature is to make it infinite, for example after completing what little there is of story.
I realise that I might have gone on with quite a rant about Shaun White Snowboarding, but it is not all bad, quite the contrary. When not getting stuck in terrain and when the controls do respond correctly, which they do most of the time, I did have a good time with it. I enjoyed myself going down the different mountains, occasionally landing some ludicrous tricks. It’s these tricks in particular that makes the game for me as it is extremely satisfying pull off. It might not be realistic, but neither is that what I wanted from the game. A decent amount of the music is also still good, like the mentioned favorite band, Social Distortion. I have one last issue with the game though… The final competition against Shaun White himself. That has to be the most anticlimactic and waste of time “boss battle” I’ve ever seen. What you get is a single half pipe event, not a big championship or anything like that, a single event! Furthermore after you have finished you have to watch Shaun do the same event, which is unskippable! The means that in the final battle of the game you spend most of your time doing nothing! Luckily it doesn’t last all that long, and this boss might be the thing you spend the least time on.
This is already way longer than I actually wanted it to be so it’s about time to sum things up. Even though the game itself might not have been as good as I remembered I still found it rather enjoyable. In between the terrible story, the sometimes unresponsive controls and the various bugs and glitches there were some genuinely great moments. From the feeling of just going down a big snowy mountain to landing some ludicrous tricks. Could I recommend playing it today? Well… it depends. For one thing it is rather difficult nowadays to get a hold of it, also there are couple of other more recent titles like Steep and Snow out there. But if you don’t have a particularly good computer Shaun White Snowboarding runs quite well on old hardware. That’s what I have to say about it, hope you liked the first issue of Nostalgia Highway, cya.
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