Shaun White Snowboarding Comments by Johnny Minkley

Looks so so good.
Really holding hope for this title!

The realtime multiplayer sounds awesome. Love the idea of jumping on the slopes with some mates and just chilling by a spot and watching other people bailing.

Snowboarding is really the perfect application for the wii balance board, I really hope this works.

Mind you, it's perhaps a bit worrying that the wii version mind end up a stripped-down poor cousin of the 360 and PS3 ones.

Sounds really positive. Could this be the sb game I've been waiting for over the last few years?

And someone release a bluetooth balance board type add-on for the PS3 already!

Essentially, if this turns out to be better then SSX Blur (which I think is excellent) then I'm buying Wii Fit. Looking forward to hearing more.

I take it the persistent multiplayer thing is not going to happen on Wii, what with Nintendo's broken online service?

After watching the gameplay videos, I'm a bit concerned about three things...

1. It's looking a bit too easy to nail landings. I sure do hope that it requires skill to land like in Amped and Amped 2.

2. The animation when you land a trick doesn't look like it has enough weight and momentum in it and therefore doesn't look very convincing... you sort of just land standing straight with your guy barely bending his knees on impact...

3. When your guy walks through the snow, there are no foot prints left behind in the snow!!! I know this is nit picking, but surely this sort of detail is achievable on current gen systems.

Other than these few quibbles, it sure does look good and heaps better than the atrocious Amped 3. I can't wait!

@NBAoz

"When your guy walks through the snow, there are no foot prints left behind in the snow!!! I know this is nit picking, but surely this sort of detail is achievable on current gen systems."

With an online title, the traffic caused by trying to update every client with the footprints laid by the other players would be a huge waste of bandwidth. I agree it would be a really nice touch, but its not something that an online should include on principal, given everything else they will be trying to achieve.

Hmmm, on that note though, an interesting question is raised regarding whether they update all clients with info on the carving line left in the snow by other snowboarders. Screenshots suggest trails are left, but are they propagated between online players?


Only issue for me is that few of my snowboard buddies play games, and vice versa. I haven't actually been boarding for 2 seasons now, so the "roam the slopes with your friends" angle is actually pretty appealing (reading that back, that is kind of sad).


Also, I am surprised nobody has wheeled out the usual Guitar Hero oriented "why not just go snowboarding" angle on this one :)

I reckon it won't be that hard. Just propagate a small vector, a line of say three points, behind every player and send that to the other machines together with the location of the players and looking direction that you already have to send. Then have the receiving computer render the footsteps or board imprint on the place of the line. It doesn't have to be really precise to look nice. Of course the prints will disappear after a few meters, but still.

Yeah, even just a few foot prints that fade after a certain amount of time or after a certain amount of prints have been left in the snow they start disappearing in order from oldest to most recent, but to tell you the truth, I am much more concerned about the other points I mentioned.

@kangarootoo

Why would you send a client footprints, as such? The client knows the location, direction and rate of travel of each player in the game anyway (otherwise they wouldn't be able to display and animate them properly) the clients can figure out each characters footprints/lines in the snow for themselves.

I't been way too long since Amped 2, the only proper snowboarding game there is. So this is very welcome. But how does the snow feel?

I'm still worried about their approach a bit - the SSX series never did anything for me, Amped is where it's at.

This sounds mint!!!!

Wonder if the mountains featured will be based upon any real world ones?

Only downer is that it's not out till November - Bah!!

looking forward to it. saw some scenes on mtv, looks sweet!

Would be great if it didn't have tricks and was just about racing down the mountain.