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 1080° Snowboarding Creator: Nintendo Genre: Race Players: 2 ESRB Rating: Everyone Rumble Pack compatible Performance Points: 9 Buy It Now 1080° (TenEighty) Snowboarding is the best snowboarding game on the Nintendo64 market. The game combines incredible racing courses, riders, and boards with incredible stunt courses, riders, and boards. There are a total of six courses, over 25 different tricks, eight snowboard riders and eight different Lamar snowboards. In 1080° Snowboarding the programmers choose to eliminate skill level settings in single races and instead let you choose you rider and customize his board. Each rider has certain qualities that benefit him, the most important are speed and control. Dion Blaster the best racer for those people who can control games rather well. Ricky Winterborn is probably the best trick rider because he can land jumps well and is fast in the air. When playing you should probably leave the rider with his default snowboard because they do best on their own boards. To sum it up, the game is overall quite a bit of fun. It is easy for anyone who has played a racing game in the past to catch on to the racing controls. The controls for the tricks take a little more practice and at first may seem stupid to some non-snowboarders but after a few tries everyone gets the hang of it and the tricks become even more addictive than the racing. All the controls are just right, not too sensitive but they respond just the perfect amount. The only downside of the game that I could find is that there is a damage meter so if you crash too many times you die. This is quite annoying for those people who simply can control themselves because it ends the game when you hit the top of the damage meter, when playing two players both players stop when one dies, no matter what. The game is intense when played with two player, although not too intense because one crash and one wrong turn can put a player a ways behind. The contest mode makes playing one player much better. In contest mode you race 4-6 courses, depending on the skill level, and you have three lives that are taken away when your damage meter goes off and if you do not win. I would give this game a 9 on the Nintendo Empire Performance Points scale for great racing and stunt but the damage meter is quite annoying and the amount of air that a rider gets off a small jump is quite unrealistic. This Article was written by Alex Noe (nintendoempire@yahoo.com) |