Full Review: I love the sound of breaking glass!
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 has been showered with praise this year by nearly every game reviewer (including our very own Chris "BRRRAAAAIIIINNS" Reiter) across the globe. Then there's the public's fascination with everything "extreme" which has lead Activision to create the Activision O2 brand. A spin-off brand of games designed to appeal entirely to the "extreme" mindset. One of the first games to come out of all this is Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder.
Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder is set up quite a bit like Tony Hawk 3. You start off in a board park and are basically allowed to go wild. Complete enough of the park's goals, and the next park will open up, and so on, until you've opened everything. This of course means pulling off tricks. The trick system used in Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder should feel at home to any Tony Hawk fan and is very easy to pick up for the rest of us. Linking tricks is a snap and trying to pull off a particular trick is easy if you know the button combination to perform it. There is still a little of the button mashing found a lot in the "extreme sport" genre, but no where near the degree found in, say, Cool Boarders 2001.
Activision has opted for a Go Anywhere style of play that takes away a lot of the realism, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. You can bust down windows and board through ski lodges and other buildings (and break dishes on a dinner table). You can grind just about anything with an edge, from lift lines to satellite towers, it's all good. And while snowboarding is a more linear sport than skateboarding (obviously you can only go downhill), Activision has figured out a nice fix for that. Scattered throughout the parks are snowmobiles, chair lifts and SUVs that you can use to go back up the mountain and try again. Pretty clever.
There is lots more to do in each park besides just tricks though. In addition to performing tricks, other park goals can include things like collecting icons, breaking signs, jumping over yuppies ("watch my latte!") or hitting animals. These goals also set up how far you can advance into the game, as new parks or stat enhancements are given to your boarder only when you complete a set number of goals. This gives Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder a fairly decent level of difficulty that will be frustrating at first, but keep you coming back for more later. All this is made possible by a fancy graphics engine that makes everything look smooth. Different types of snow not only look different, but affect your boarder differently. The varied types of snow and buildings are able to give each park it's own personality. This is a far cry from the boarders, who's only difference seems to be height and color of their clothes. They all handle pretty much the same, and they all look pretty much the same. This isn't a terrible thing, but the parks have so much personality, I expected the boarders to have it too.
Like all "extreme" games before it, the soundtrack features music that would make your parents’ ears bleed. But I love it, the boys at Activision picked a nice selection of hard rock tunes. "New Disease" by Spineshank is one of my new favorite songs and "Courage" from Alien Ant Farm has really made me rethink picking up and putting down AAF's CD every time I'm in House of Guitars (shameless plug alert: if you're ever in Rochester, NY, go to the House of Guitars, it's an experience). And the developers were actually able to find a Static-X song that doesn't suck. I'm impressed; I didn't think that was possible. The background music does manage to drown out almost every other sound in the game though. Except for the yuppies, who seem to be carrying bullhorns instead of cell phones now. This background music problem can be said of almost every game with a high profile soundtrack, and I know I've said it before.
Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder also features some of the coolest two player modes ever. There's your basic race mode (called Palmer X here because face it, X's are hip), but more interesting is Push. Push has two players going downhill performing tricks. The better your tricks, the more of the split screen you control. The first person to push the other player off the screen wins. Push just might be the greatest multiplayer game ever. There's also a straight up trick competition and a HORSE trick competition. Actually it can be any word up to ten letters. Oh the possibilities are endless.
Activision has also thrown in a Create-a-Boarder mode as more or less an afterthought. Your only real customization options are a few sets of clothes that weren't used for the pro boarders. Yawn.
