Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, you've undoubtedly heard of Shaun White. With a self-branded videogame franchise and three Olympic gold and X-Games titles under his belt, he has once again teamed with Ubisoft to bring snowboarding to the masses. With its charming aesthetic and cheeky cast of characters, White Snowboarding: World Stage provides an amusing snowboarding distraction for those who might not want to spend hours falling on the snow just to experience the thrill of flying through the air or careening down a mountainside.
Instead of watering down the experience of its current-gen brethren, Ubisoft created a completely different game when the first Shaun White Snowboarding games were released last winter. By utilizing the Wii's strengths, Road Trip proved to be the best of the three versions; the jittery "lifelike" animations were replaced with bright and cartoony graphics, the finicky control scheme with a simple but effective combination of button presses and flicks of your wrist. Road Trip was simple to pick up and play and was instantly gratifying; gravity-defying spins and grabs were no further away than simple movements of the Wii Remote.
The problem was that it was all style and little substance; after the initial shock at how much better of a game it was than its PS3/Xbox 360 counterparts wore off, there was little underneath the surface. Aside from a change of venue, not much has changed with World Stage.
Don't get me wrong; World Stage is fun. For the sake of younger players and those who want a quick, cheap thrill, the controls are largely forgiving. Use the Wii-mote (or, alternatively, the Balance Board -- a useful option for those of you who have one collecting dust in a closet) to control your boarder. Remote waggles combined with button presses result in a variety of twists, spins, and grabs.
But after I realized that flailing my arms around wildly gave me just as much of a chance at succeeding as carefully timed, specific movements -- so long as I positioned my avatar to land straight forward -- gameplay began to grow tedious. With minimal skill involved, there wasn't much else to keep me interested other than wondering where on the podium my merry band of wide-eyed shredheads would end up.
