Freestyle snowboarding makes it’s XBox debut, find out if it’s worth the effort! Yes with all new consoles must come a snowboarding game. These are heralded as the game that MUST be on every system. For N64 there was 1080, for PS2 there was SSX, and even for Dreamcast there was Rippin’ Riders. Are all of these good? Of course not but they were all specific to their own console and gave the system it’s much needed extreme sport. Now with the XBox out it actually has three snowboarding games. A port of the popular SSX Tricky, Dark Summit, and Microsoft’s own Amped. How does it stack up to the competition?
First I wanna note that the first time we popped in Amped I absolutely hated the game. The controls were frustrating and it didn’t feel very polished. After a few hours of struggling with the controls I decided to stop trying to play it like Tony Hawk, much to my surprise this worked! Once you get past the Tony Hawk style of gameplay that you are used to, you feel a sudden urge to scream. I must admit that after giving it a chance this game turned out to control almost as good as the Hawk man himself, just in a different fashion.
Now after getting past my initial frustrations (unlike some print magazines I do play the game more than fifteen minutes before making my judgment) I began to see the beauty of Amped. First off the graphics are downright incredible. Using the hard drive to cache the mountains and trees really helped with the draw in and slow down. Making Amped one of the most gorgeous snowboarding games around. Yes there are some clipping issues, but ya know what, they don’t affect the gameplay so who cares??
Next department sound…where can you go wrong with custom soundtracks? Putting my own music in this game is awesome and adds so much personal flavor to my gaming experience. Now I know you say what if I want the original soundtrack?? Well you cannot go wrong there either as Amped hosts over 120 music tracks from Indie bands that you are sure to never have heard of. The main thing is after hearing some of them you may wanna hear more!
Amped is a game that defines what a snowboarding game should be. Like SSX before it, it adds new flavor to a stale genre. I hope to see more originality like this on my Xbox in the future. Tired rehashed of the same old shit get very tiring. I salute Amped and recommend everyone at least give it a rent. It is well worth a blockbuster night!
