Shaun White Snowboarding (DS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.5 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Carolyn Petit
• Reviewed on: 12/18/2008
• Released on: 11/16/2008
• Originally published on GameSpot: Shaun White Snowboarding (DS) Review

Shaun White Snowboarding for the DS plays to the strengths of Nintendo's handheld, offering a control scheme that makes excellent use of the touch screen. When the game is at its best, you can get lost in the chilly rush of leaping, tricking, and grinding your way down the slopes. Unfortunately, the other aspects of the game don't always live up to the potential of the controls, but despite a few rough spots, this is still a mostly enjoyable portable snowboarding experience.

The controls here are easy to learn and easy to master. You start off with an outline of a snowboard on the touch screen. By holding the stylus on the lower part of the board, you'll go slower but have much tighter control of your turns. If you hold the tip of the stylus against the higher part of the board, you'll lean in, increasing your speed but limiting your turning ability. A quick flick down and then up will make you leap into the air, at which point you can perform tricks just by scratching in any direction. Those looking for a more technical snowboarding game may be disappointed by the wicked ease with which you can pull off insane tricks, but for those who don't mind seeing realism thrown to the wind, watching your rider wildly flip and spin in conjunction with the patterns you trace on the touch screen can be joyously liberating.

You can also do grabs and tweaks as you trick by pressing the control pad (or face buttons for lefties) and shoulder buttons, and as long as you stop twisting an instant before your board comes back into contact with the earth, you'll land safely and get an instant speed boost for your efforts. Grinding on rails is fun, too; doing so brings up a nifty little meter that sways to the left or right, indicating your balance. To maintain it, you'll need to compensate by swinging the tip of the stylus to the left or right of the board. In every respect, the controls feel natural and immediately accessible, so much so that you hardly need to think about them at all. They disappear into the experience and let you focus entirely on the action of speeding down the slopes.

To advance through the game's four mountains and eventually race against Shaun White himself at his own secret spot, you'll need to collect passes, and you do that by winning races and challenges. Races pit you against three AI riders, but as long as you stick to a decent racing line and pull off tricks now and then to keep up your speed, you'll never have a problem leaving them in your snowy dust. The simple act of riding and tricking your way down the mountain is fun in and of itself, but the consistent lack of difficulty saps the races of some excitement. Challenges are more varied and interesting, and you can try to complete as many available challenges in a single run as you'd like. They range from the straightforward and easy, such as trying to score a certain number of trick points in a pass down the mountain, to the more involved and challenging, such as tricking off of a specific landmark or collecting all of the letters in the name Shaun.

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