Original Release: Nintendo, 1998, Nintendo 64
Other Releases: Wii (2008)
A surprising sports title developed in-house by Nintendo that focuses heavily on technical tricks and advanced skill.
1080 Snowboarding (Nintendo 64, Nintendo, 1998)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
I’m not a hardcore fan of snowboarding, and 1080 Snowboarding quickly made it clear that it’s not really made for me. It may be good for you if you have the patience to figure out all the controls and nuances, but it’s definitely not something you can pick up and get right into. The controls are not intuitive at all.
At the outset you can only do tournament races (which is a one-on-one against another snowboarder), time attacks or “Trick Attacks” where you either endlessly do 180 Airs or fall on your face while desperately trying to figure out how to do something more awesome. Lord knows what the button is to do the 750 Shifty Skeezy or whatever … I didn’t have the patience to keep enduring Fail after Fail to figure it out and there’s no in-game tutorial of any kind.
The music is some hilarious corporate Japanese take on what I guess they thought the hip Western youth were into in 1998. Starting with some weird grumbly metal with vocals so distorted I can’t even tell if they are in English or Japanese, to some guy repetitively yelling “Work Ya Body WorkWork Ya Body”, the music is consistently annoying.
You start out with four trust fund kids you can play as lounging around the ski lodge, and I guess you can unlock more as you play, supposedly there’s a pretty good range of characters.
Admittedly I’m probably being too hard on it because I don’t give a damn about snowboarding nor have the patience to figure out the intricacies of the game engine. But that should tell you that it is not really for snowboarding noobs or casual gamers right there.
To say something nice … umm … the track graphics are pretty good when seen in high-res and there’s a decent variety of backdrops.
Maybe if you’re big into snowboarding, this one might be worth a shot. If you’re new to snowboarding games I’d start with something easier to pick up and play than this one, it will probably frustrate you in short order as it did to me.
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