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Platform: Gameboy Advance Genre: Sports Publisher: Activision Developer: Natsume ESRB: E (Everyone) Released: Q4 2001 Support AE! Buy Games Here:
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Shaun Palmer's Pro SnowboarderScore: 7/10 |
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Pros: - Easy to pick up - Decent replay value |
Cons: - Visuals not all that great - Could do without the voice work |
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"It’s
not the prettiest title to hit the GBA, but it provides enough fun to
keep one occupied for a good while.
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Sometimes
when I’m getting used to the controls on a new game I wind up feeling
like the bozo running around yelling, “Where the hell’s my
pencil?!?” only to realize shortly there after that it was in their
hand all along. Shaun
Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder (SPPS) on the GBA did the same thing when I
first sank my teeth into it, there was just something that wouldn’t
quite gel with how the boarders handled.
Thankfully after a little persistence and practice the problems
cleared and what I found was an entertaining little excursion into the
mono-boardial winter wonders of Snowboarding in SPPS.
The
crux of the game is zipping around doing tricks more or less to your
heart’s content, what with it being a snowboarding game and all.
The handy dandy thing about this being the handheld version of
the game is that those the controls are heavily streamlined, focusing on
the A and B buttons, in order to pull off the tricks.
While in some ways it does limit what you can do compared to
snowboarding titles on the consoles, this helps to simplify matters on
the teeny, tiny GBA. What’s
going on on-screen is tough enough to see as it is, so keeping the
jumps, rotations, and manuals in a concentrated area of control helps
keep things from feeling overwhelming in the sometimes confining arena
of the GBA. While
zipping around and flying about players will be able to do so in races,
or just going nuts in freestyle. Either
way there’s plenty on the tracks to keep you busy, whether dealing
with the obstacles on the course by doing tricks off of them, or trying
to avoid them, all while accomplishing the usual mix of goals set out on
each track which must be done in order to unlock the next track,
typical, traditional fair in that regard.
Seeing as it is snowboarding, a downhill sport, that means not
having the ability to backtrack when you miss something.
If you screw up, well tough, you can restart the run or forget
about it. Regardless, the
game does a good job of giving players a good amount to play with, while
dangling a few carrots for those with an eye for the daring and crave a
little more of a challenge. Either
way running through the courses provides the requisite amounts of fun,
especially when you consider that there are high scores to be broken.
But
while the game is fun to play, it’s not too fun to look at.
While a number of titles to hit the GBA have looked decidedly
16-bit, SPPS looks somewhere between 8-bit and 16-bit, more on par with
the visuals in a mid-grade TurboGrafx-16 game from times yore.
The animation is very smooth with no signs of slowdown, but the
quality of the visuals left something to be desired.
The sound effects are a bit better with decent enough peppy music
for the tricks and the racing, but the scratchy voiceovers should never
have been included in the game, very annoying. If
you like the extreme sports, but want a break for the skateboarding
titles and don’t have a hankering for BMX bikes, SPPS should provide
you with a nice little diversion. It’s
not the prettiest title to hit the GBA, but it provides enough fun to
keep one occupied for a good while. - Mr. Nash (February 23, 2002) Search for Related Topics: ...More Gameboy Advance Game Reviews... |
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