Shaun White Snowboarding Preview

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If you've ever been high up a snow-encrusted mountain on a clear day, you'll know exactly how energising it is to gaze around at the landscape below - and Shaun White Snowboarding does as good a job as we can remember seeing of conveying that sense of the epic. But to those familiar with the breathtaking views from the highest points of Assassin's Creed, this is to be expected.

It bears up less well at this stage when you examine the details; frequently objects appear out of nowhere, particularly trees towards the bottom of the course, and some of the textures are bland and indistinct. The fidelity of the pre-stage cutscene is also worryingly low, although that's surely something that will be upped before release.

We love the camera. There are five set positions to choose from, but it's wonderfully dynamic, intelligently zooming out when you approach a ramp or slope to give you a glorious, widescreen eye-full of your imminent giant leap. There's also a first-person view thrown in or good measure.

Control-wise, the basics are solid and responsive, and within a few minutes we're already achieving some vaguely competent rail grinds and mid-air posturing in amongst the agonising plunges into the icy abyss. There is a very real sense of freedom on the mountain, its varied topography providing all manner of challenges and opportunities.

It's hard to appreciate any subtlety and nuance that may lie within the trick system on what amounts to a very brief playtest. It's clear the game does lean more towards the studied realism of Amped, which is no bad thing. Our biggest issue at this point is with the speed.

Even hurtling down the steepest parts of the mountain, leaning forward as hard as we can, it never quite delivers that sense of exhilaration, that electrifying surge of adrenaline that is the drug of downhill racing. To us, it just feels too cautious, too sedate at present, more Sunday drive than Ski Sunday.

Maybe we're clamouring for the arcade experience the team is consciously avoiding; but we still feel that even a slight boost could make a huge difference to the sense of thrill, danger and excitement we want to feel when we're belting through such eye-poppingly vast environments.

Wii owners necessarily cannot share in the Assassin's engine love-in, so Nintendo's system, as is often the case, gets a unique version with a slightly younger, more casual skew on it. The big draw is Balance Board support, which lets you literally ape the actions of a snowboarder.

After a brief demo we get a couple of runs at this. Our on-screen boarder responds convincingly to our movements. Standing sideways on, leaning forwards and backwards steers, while left and right equate to accelerate and brake. Tricks are accessed through a combination of the Wiimote buttons and the leg pump to elevate you in the first place - performed in exactly the same manner as the ski jump mini-game in Wii Fit.

It's good fun and the instant appeal and accessibility it will have for families is obvious. Whether it can transcend novelty sufficiently to sustain a full price product is another question, of course, and one only extended play will answer. On Wii Shaun White is fully playable either with Balance Board or Wiimote, with slight differences to level design and difficulty to accommodate the differing demands - although board and remote can tackle each other in multiplayer.

Balancing the gameplay is the team's biggest headache here, we're told. And we confess to being a little concerned that, for a game designed originally for the Wiimote (with a post-Wii Fit rewrite to accommodate the Balance Board), we are not allowed to play it with one at this point.

So, with Shaun White Snowboarding, the big task of building a new brand from scratch has at least one big idea, in the player-populated pistes, that should make it one to watch for those clamouring for a new generation snowboarding hero to worship. We're all for thinking big; just so long as someone's keeping an eye on the details.