Stoked

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After being completely disappointed by Shaun White Snowboarding back in November, it left me waiting to see if Stoked could pick up the slack left by the SSX series oh so many years ago.

This is only on 360 and is by a dev I've never heard of before (Bongfish). It just came out ($40 too which is pretty cool) and I haven't seen any reviews for it yet. Previews have been positive and the feature list sounds neat.

* Five Gigantic Real-World Mountains: Explore five world-renowned summits. Discover new drop points by helicopter, bail out and experience more than 45 square-miles of open terrain on each peak.

* Dynamic Weather and Environments: Every day the snow and weather conditions change on each of the mountains featured in the game. Snow accumulates on mountain surfaces, changing the riding experience, opening new paths, and building new trickable features and challenges.

* Seamless Multiplayer: Invite your friends to ride with you in instant drop-in multiplayer!

* Style Crafting: Learn and create new tricks as you proceed down the path of becoming a legend. As you develop your style, the animation system will adapt to how you play, and the other riders on the mountain will emulate your look and your moves!

So it sounds like a total snowboard package for a damn good price. If it controls well it should be great until those dopes at EA let us know about SSX. I'm going to try and get my hands on it next week.

I read about the dynamic weather/slope thing and it sounds pretty cool. Not really my type of game but I am still intrigued.

Would you say that you are stoked for it?

Sorry.

Kinda. If it's dope I will be.

This came today, impressions soon(ish).

OK, I haven't had a single urge to snap the disc in half so that immediately makes it better than Shaun White Snowboarding.

First, this isn't SSX. It's stictley back country snowboarding with realistic tricks. No paths, just dropped off by a helicopter and away you go. Down the mountain you come across objectives you can activate. Most are do "this specific trick" or "any spin and grab to beat this score". There are also Pro objectives for various achievements to get in a session (35k points, do 2 grabs in a single air and get over a certain amount of points).

The game looks pretty good, better than SWS I think. The snow looks really good, you leave trails that stay around when you retry, you get covered in snow when you fall. The weather effects are pretty cool to, there is a day/night cycle too. Animation is solid too, but the character customization is very limited at the start.

Controls are a bit like skate. You steer with the left stick, grabs are on the triggers. You ollie with the right stick and that is also used for different grabs (hold the L trigger, any direction with the right stick for a different grab, some with the R trigger). When you come up to a jump, you hold one of the triggers to prewind to spin. So doing bigger tricks is more of a timing thing. Crouch early, prewind if you want to spin like a top and then flick and release at the right time to go flying. It feels weird at first but I think it works pretty well. Landing a clean trick is pretty satisfying. It keeps tracks of the type of tricks you do. Style (slow, smooth tricks) or Hucker (fast spins, lots of tricks in one air). The game unlocks certain tricks for you based on which style you major in. You can't major in both, it's one or the other.

Audio is pretty sweet too. Big soundtrack, I haven't recognized any names but there is some good shit on there, a lot of genres. Cool little option is to pick your "success" jingle when you finish an objective.

There are 5 mountains, you start with one open with about....8 drop off points. Everything loads really fast which is great. The runs themselves seem kinda short though. The areas are pretty wide and when everything is open there is a lot of real estate to explore. The "level" design is kinda weird though. Sometimes there are flat sections that are boring as shit. If you lose your speed it can be a pain to get through to the next hill. Once you get moving, the sense of speed is really great. Each run ends in a flat section, once you stop moving you get options on what you'd like to do (call the chopper, go to the map).

I'd say it's a solid game, but something is missing. I'm not sure what it is, I just don't get that awesome game feeling from it that makes you want to play it again as soon as you can. I'd play it over SWS, that's for sure. $40 is a great price for it, but I think I'm going to wait awhile to buy it.