Shaun White Snowboarding

Rating: T

Score 8.5/10

If Tony Hawk can achieve huge success with a video game series, why can’t Shaun White? This game is available for the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, PSP and PC.

Shaun White is a real boarder, both snowboarding and skateboarding. He’s won multiple gold medals and tournaments. He’s also the first (and only) person to win both a summer and winter Dew Cup.

He helps you go from snowboarding wannabe to snowboarding god. Your first mission is to collect coins spread across four mountains. After you collect all of them, your next mission is to collect more. It’s not exciting or entertaining, but it’s better than nothing.

Outside of the story is where this game gets good. Instead of a linear experiment, this game gives you all four mountains to ride as many times as you want, for infinite amounts of time! Just ride around until you feel like completing your next mission. It’s great to finally break free of inferior limits and get the true freedom to do whatever you want!

While on the mountains, you can do a handful of things. First is getting off your board. This doesn’t add much, but it can help you explore new areas in the mountain. Another thing you can do is throw snowballs at people. It’s not useful, but it’s amusing to nail someone in the face with a snowball right before they land a trick.

Being in the middle of a “realistic” and “arcade-style” snowboarding game, you get a nice mix of styles in this game. You can only do a small number of tricks, but you can use almost anything as a ramp. A tree, logs, a house, and small piles of snow are only a few of the useable ramps. From the top of a mountain, you can also start an avalanche. You know you’re cool when you can outrun an avalanche while doing amazing tricks.

The music is a nice combination of old and new music. There’s good variety and a lot of good songs too. Thankfully, you can easily switch songs should one come up you don’t like.

Online play is included in this game. Gather some friends and head out to the mountains! Throw snowballs, race, or just ride. It’s tons of fun for relaxed and competitive gamers.

To say it’s only a snowboarding game would label it unfairly. To say anything otherwise would be wrong. It’s an amazing snowboarding game with some platforming, snowball fighting, and racing built in. This game is a realistic arcade-like snowboarding game experience that’s truly more than expected.