One of my earliest PlayStation memories was of a demo disc that contained one of the Cool Boarders games, I forget which one exactly. Snow itself was a rarity in my life, and snowboarding was, therefore, an impossibility, save for its digital incarnations.
For me, after Cool Boarders was a chunk of nothing before SSX arrived on the PlayStation 2, but in the wider world, the other console that was the Nintendo 64 had its own snowboarding title, and it was probably a fair bit better, as we'll soon find out after playing some 1080° Snowboarding.
Fun Times
1080° is as relaxed as games come, with your first task being to pick the mode you want to play, and the second being to choose your rider. They're not exactly memorable characters, but Dion here, upon me rejecting him as a choice, gave a line reading straight out of the mouth of the Okay Guy which convinced me otherwise.
Each rider has a load of boards available to them from the start, which is nice, but they all look awful in the graphics department and are all over the place in their stats. Why pick a board that focuses on one area when this one does the lot?
Frustrations
Even a whopper of a board can't help you from falling flat on your arse seven seconds into your first race if you so much as even think about landing funny. You can control your character in the air and will need to rotate and level out on multiple axes in order to land to their satisfaction.
Or not... 1080° is really picky about when a landing has been nailed or not, to the point where it might as well be random as to whether you come out of one upright and unscathed. It's particularly unfortunate that the first mode is a straight race between you and another rider, where falling on your backside not only slows you down, but damages you, and taking too much damage will end your race on the spot.
You have to get through five races with three lives, but even on the easiest difficulty setting, this is tricky. One wrong move - however it is that the game decides that - can see your opponent zip past you and never be seen again. The races can feel over before they've even begun.
Luckily for us, a race from the top of the hill to the bottom is just one of many modes, and it's a mode where performing tricks is the stupidest idea, so it's about time we head into an event that does allow us to grab and spin and whatnot.
Turns out the wonderful Project64 doesn't like it when you press the A and B buttons at the same time. I'll just work out the kinks before moving on. I could play 1080° on original hardware, and did, but I've still got image issues, and trying to land a white snowboard on white snow using the white sky and white horizon as a judge of depth isn't a game, it's nonsense.
Emulation issues dealt with, the Trick Attack mode sees you bombing it down a hill pulling off as many successful and high scoring tricks as you can. This sounds easy, but the tracks have amazingly small amounts of jumps and nice tricking opportunities, which means you really need to carve out a line that will allow you to string together something interesting.
At which point you land, tumble end over end three times (maybe that's where the 1080° in the title comes from), and lose all the points you might have gotten were you to have been successful instead.
Again, this mode just isn't cutting it, and the final mode I bothered to try was the Contest mode.
Further Fun Times
Now, this is snowboarding. Alright, I went the wrong way around the gates for the first few, but this slalom run really showed off the controls. The Nintendo 64s analogue stick was put to use by a great many games, and when a game demanded its use, it was easy to see why. All of a sudden, navigating the slopes clicked. Turning was controlled, speed was manageable, and I didn't have to worry about jumping, let alone tricks, so landing was a breeze too - or certainly not a harsh penalty when the inevitable crash did happen.
But what is snowboarding without the tricks?
Oh, now we're talking. One ski jump? That's Round 2? Bring it on.
When failures count as successes, I'm a happy player. But in this case, I'm not a satisfied one, and it was another few rounds before the smiles really began to shine.
The Half Pipe. Designed for showcasing tricks. A playground to slap the analogue stick into one of eight directions while holding the B button to grab, or to rotate it while holding the R button to spin. That was all I knew, really, before heading into the Half Pipe.
I suddenly thought 'wait, what about the landings! This is going to suck!', but had already pushed off down the hill at that point, and tricking was my only option. Thank the Miyamoto himself, there seemed to be some kind of auto-landing in this event, and I wasn't found face first in the snow at any point - there were some moments of not landing in a fashion that allowed my rider to effortlessly flow into the next trick, but I'll take that.
Finally, 1080° Snowboarding was playing like I hoped it would.
And then it black screened on me.
Can't have everything, eh?
Final Word
Being able to pull off spectacular moves in a video game version of a sport where the physical you would struggle to even stand on the board is always a joy. From the simple games that give you a jump and a trick button, to more complex titles that task you with delicate inputs, or require you to understand the physics engine, games that give you the thrill of the sport are successful games.
Is 1080° Snowboarding thrilling in the truest sense of the word? Perhaps not, but compared to the competition, it's quite possibly the greatest snowboarding title of the late 1990s (not that I'm aware of a great many snowboarding titles, to be honest).
It's tricky, and a little ruthless - the rubberbanding is supposedly ridiculous, requiring near-perfect runs in higher difficulty races - and when played today it probably doesn't look as good as it did twenty years ago, but it looks plenty good enough to enjoy regardless.
It won't turn many heads, but it's a nice distraction. I try to not make these posts too referential to each other, but 1080° Snowboarding might just have been what I needed to give Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri a bit of a cleaner slate to try again from. I've had my fun for the evening, now it's time for some research. There's a 250-page manual waiting to be read...
Enough about me. Strap on a board and shred down the slopes. Do snowboarders shred? They do now.
Fun Facts
Attention to detailed physics doesn't just stop at the character animations, reaching out for the snow when they lean over too far or throwing their arms out for balance after hitting an obstacle, for example - the characters' clothes will ripple in the wind if you go fast enough.
1080° Snowboarding, developed by Nintendo EAD, first released in 1998.
Version played: Nintendo 64, 1998, also via emulation.