Released: 14th November 2008
Genre: sports
Publisher: Ubisoft
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
Other Formats: DS, PS2, PS3, PSP
Players: 1 (online 2-16
I love snowboarding games ,lets be perfectly honest who doesn’t, and have been a fan of the genre since I first purchased SSX many years ago. The only problem I had with SSX was its realism, or lack of to be more precise, and as such I love a chance for grittier experience so when I saw Shaun White: Snowboarding in the local bargain bin I had to give it a run.
Look ma one hand.
The best thing about games such as this is there is no need for me to skip over spoilers and be careful of revealing too many story twists, what story there is follows in a simple process Earn respect and conquer the mountains at your disposal, Simple and effective . This means I can get right into the gritty gears of the game and how it does or more often then not does not work. You take the role of an unknown snowboarder with 4 mountains at your disposal thanks to some friends you make at the beginning of the game Park city (your home mountain as such), Alaska, Europe and Japan. Each mountain has different terrain and challenges for you to master and eventually take on the big man Shaun White himself for ultimate respect.
Each mountain is beautiful to ride through and some of the views and areas you enter are graphically very nice even if you just see them as a blur when speeding down an ice track towards a ramp. The mass amounts of NPCs boarding around can get irritating when they keep bumping into you , personally I like this as it reminds you that your starting off with everyone else and you don’t have a whole mountain just for you to explore.
Challenges and Events come in your typical styles of Big Air, Freestyle, Race, Ground and Air Tricking. As well as various collection missions scattered around the mountains for you to complete. Each event has a different type of snowboard suited to it as an example Park boards are better for Freestyle events due to improved turning and trick speed. Players can buy new boards with money earned in competitions aswell as buy new clothing , backpacks and other accessories. Boards are mildly pricey to begin with but you will soon build up a large sum of money and the right board could mean the difference between winning an event and losing it.
I love the open Freeroam and the ability to un-strap the board and hike on foot to areas you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise these are great aspects for a game like this to include. The only gripe I really have with Shaun White: Snowboarding is the controls, you have to like an intuitive control system and they really have thought about how to make this one work, but its awkward and feels clumsy when you start to use it. Like Skate 3 the controls use a LS to move and RS to trick configuration which by all rights should work, after all Skate 3 worked smoothly in my experience, and that does work but it is messed up by the allocation of the jump or Ollie button. Instead of the usual press A to jump it has been re-assigned to the Right Trigger, I don’t know why this makes it feel odd but it does and it may just be me but I had real trouble getting used to this.
Once you get used to the control System the only problem left is the map menu, it never highlighted the option I was looking for when it came to travelling to different parts of the mountain. You would quite often have to Free-roam to a destination from a higher point on the mountain and it is easy to take the wrong path if your not paying attention to the map so perhaps some sort of GPS system would have been great, if not a little unrealistic, I can sacrifice a small amount of realism in order for less frustrating game play.
Overall Shaun White snowboarding is a great game that has been burdened with an unseemly control system and irritating menus, but this doesn’t detract from how much fun the game is. Hurtling down a big air ramp to fly off the end performing a double backflip and grab will never get boring. Will it?
Rating: 
