Shaun White Snowboarding: World Stage (second version)

WITH THE KIND SUPPORT OF UBISOFT / NINTENDO / BURTON / SMARTOYS

There is nothing quite like strapping on a snowboard for the first time. The tingling chill of the winter wind sets your body abuzz, and the glistening blanket of pristine snow stretches endlessly in the distance, begging you to carve a path through its immaculate surface. When you first push off, you wobble and fall, dust off the snow, and fall again. But the first time you make it down a hill upright, or land a jump off a tiny bump, a wave of excitement courses through your body. It's an indescribable feeling that becomes slightly dulled over time, pushing you to continually try new tricks to keep the excitement level high. Shaun White Snowboarding: World Stage, like its predecessor released last year, captures the thrill of the sport beautifully with intuitive motion controls and high-flying aerial tricks, but it offers little to distinguish itself from the first game. The joy of winding your way down a mountain or landing a twisting, twirling leap has been tempered because it feels so familiar. World Stage is a well-made snowboarding game that will thrill first-time entrants, but it may leave returning veterans out in the cold.

The controls in Shaun White Snowboarding: World Stage have not been altered at all from last year's release, but this is a good thing. Using just a Wii Remote, you can easily glide down the mountains, weave seamlessly around corners, spring breathlessly into the air, and smoothly contort your body into all sorts of wicked shapes before you land perfectly back on the snow. Aside from using the A and B buttons to tweak your trick set and control your speed, you perform every move with motion controls. Tilting the remote to turn and flicking it up to jump mimics the actions of your in-game avatar, making World Stage incredibly easy to pick up and enjoy whether you're a longtime snowboarder or favor the safety of a well-insulated ski lodge. The only blemish in this otherwise excellent control scheme is a tendency for your rider to spin in the air, even when you don't want that to happen. As long as you focus on keeping your controller steady at all times, this won't happen, but if you relax at the wrong moment, you'll crash spectacularly.

If the idea of controlling a snowboarder with your hands seems ridiculous, World Stage makes excellent use of the balance board as well. You still need to use a Wii Remote to tweak your trick set in the air, but everything else is controlled with your feet. Leaning into turns, adjusting your positioning to speed up or slow down, and leaping into the air to perform a bevy of spins and grabs work really well, making World Stage mirror the real sport in just about every way but the punishing cold. Unfortunately, you can use only one balance board at a time, so multiplayer participants will have to decide in a civil manner who gets the board. World Stage does make use of the Wii MotionPlus, but only in a trick editor between events. It's a neat feature, but it would have been more interesting to take advantage of this peripheral while snowboarding. ...

Category:

Gaming

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• shaun
• white
• snowboarding
• world
• stage
• shaun white
• ubisoft
• UBISOFT
• burton
• snowboard
• MCM
• Smartoys
• SMARTOYS
• smartoys.be