Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding

Pros • The first snowboarding game to capture the true feel of the sport • Fantastic visuals with infinite draw-in distance and the best videogame snow ever • A nice balance of real-world fame-seeking with unworldly trick-pulling • 150 original songs on the soundtrack, plus you can rip your own tunes to the hard drive	Cons • Some pretty noticeable clipping issues • SSX and Tony Hawk fanatics won't dig the Zen-like pace • Control scheme isn't as good as it could be
Bottom Line A snowboarding game that--gasp!--actually tries to simulate the snowboarding experience. And that's a good thing, as Ms. Martha would say. Electronic Arts' recently released SSX Tricky for the PlayStation 2 is one incredible ass-kickin' supa-mutha of a snowboarding game...and that's really too bad. Because it means Amped, Microsoft's foray into an uncharted sub-genre of snowboarding games (itself a sub-genre of the extreme sports game, with all the greatness and crud that comes with that particular family tree), is going to be compared to SSX Tricky and found wanting--for all the wrong reasons. Amped isn't about wacky characters or fantasy mountains or even snowboard racing, per se. It's all about freestyle, taking the time to choose your line down gigantic, wide-open mountain faces and the pick the tricks that will rack up the best scores. And the game delivers on just about everything it promises: huge runs, no time limits, real snowboarders, building up fame, winning sponsorship goodies, and maybe just a little bit of insane trick-pulling that you'd never see on planet Earth. I don't know about where you ski or board, but I've never seen anyone grind along a chairlift cable before. Though it might be a fun thing to try...

We all know that the SSX games have about as much to do with real-world snowboarding as Playboy bunnies do with real world women. You buy into the illusion for the fun of it, knowing full well that doing a noseslide while smashing through skyscraper windows on your board and/or attempting to date a Playboy model would both have the same end result in the real world: a broken neck.

But because the success of the Tony Hawk vein of extreme sports games means there's really no videogame equivalent of real-world snowboarding that's been more than a blip on the radar, gamers might come into Amped expecting it to be something it's not. Yes, you can pull all sorts of impossible whacked-out, big air tricks, but the look and feel and physics of the game try to stay as true to the boarding experience as is possible and practical.

Amped's career mode sees you ranked No. 125 in the boarding world, and your mission in life is to claw your way to the top of the heap by beating high scores and challenging local pros on more than a dozen mountain faces modeled after their real-world counterparts. The mechanics of the game are pretty simple: start at the top, do tricks as you go down, and when you hit the bottom of the hill, you're done. Each mountain is littered with a snowboarding wet dream's worth of jumps, half-pipes, rails and other obstacles to get air off of, grind along, or otherwise work into your tricking repertoire.

Naturally the first thing you'll notice about Amped are the utterly sick visuals. (OK, that's the first and last attempt at boarder jargon you'll see here. This poseur humbly apologizes.) A crafty blending of super-far draw-in distances and high-res background textures makes looking off into the distance from the top of the mountain seem like, well, looking off into the distance from the top of the mountain. The riders are intricately detailed with realistic animations, and the snow...sweet mother of Odin, the snow! Microsoft says there are 20 different snow textures in Amped, and on this I believe them. Carving through virgin snow at the top of the Altibahn open bowl runs leaves deep, three-dimensional tracks in the white stuff, while hitting the lip of a ramp at high speed leaves a blast of powder in your wake that drifts back to the ground as you sail through the air. The snow effects are so realistic that I found I had to hang back a bit when following a pro down the mountain, so that the rooster tail of snow coming off his board wouldn't obscure the jumps I was trying to hit. Rounding out the sensory experience are the surprisingly realistic sound effects (in full Dolby 5.1 if you've got the set-up to support it) and the 150 songs (!) in the soundtrack, which you can customize according to genre and/or supplement with your own ripped tunes.

The trick system in Amped combines elements of Tony Hawk and SSX, though it's not as intuitive as it might be, requiring double button taps or moving the right analog stick to perform all-important grabs. It's awkward because you have to hold down and release the A button to jump (or use the right analog stick's click-in function, which is even harder), and I find myself often defaulting to stalefish grabs because it's easy to push left on the right analog stick with your thumb knuckle while releasing the A button. Any other grab requires you to actually take your thumb off the A button and move the stick or hit another button, and that brief delay can mean the difference between landing a triple backflip on your board or on your head. Hitting grinds is also a little more difficult than it needs to be, and if you're used to the Tony Hawk brand of effortless snapping on and off rails and edges, you might find the precision needed to nail slides and grinds in Amped a little daunting.

Amped's real strength is in its career mode, which balances open-ended boarding with defined goals. Each mountain requires you to beat one or more high scores to unlock either another run on the mountain or another mountain face altogether. And since you're trying to make the big time, pulling tricks in front of the media--snowboarding mag photographers, video cameramen and whatnot--is not only important to your score (any trick caught on camera is worth double the normal points), but to your ambition. Hitting media score goals on each run gets you a little more added attention, resulting in sponsorships that unlock new brand-name clothes and gear, allow you to challenge a pro in a run down the mountain, and add another Monty Python-esque animated clip to your scrapbook, showing your newfound fame in the pages of the local paper, on an underground snowboarding website or in a highlight on the evening news. For fun, you can also seek out and run over eight taunting snowmen on each mountain face, with added bonuses for ridding the run of their presence.

There are a few things that keep Amped from being the perfect snowboarding pseudo-sim, the most noticeable being the clipping and collision detection issues. Your rider will sink into hard ice as readily as deep snow when he bails, and the many rails and pipelines littering each run for sliding and grinding tend to cause problems when you crash into them. It's a graphical thing that doesn't really affect gameplay, but it certainly pulls you out of the illusion of reality when you see your rider's head disappear into a thick rail or even levitate down its length after impaling himself on the obstacle. The camera is also occasionally dodgy, and often when you hit a steep ramp it will stay below you for too long, not allowing you to get a fix on the ground to calculate your landing in time.

Easy to get into but hard to master, Amped offers a surprising amount of depth and graphical splendor for what is basically such a simple premise: point your board down a mountain and become famous in the process. It won't replace SSX Tricky, but Amped deserves a spot alongside it in the library of anyone who likes extreme sports games unburdened by suckitude.

Info & Screenshots