Rippin' Riders

"After much thought, I believe I found myself with the end thought of the game name meaning to rip the disk up in frustration."

Ever since 1080 Snowboarding on Nintendo 64, I was captivated by the idea of snowboarding. I've watched it to death on the Olympics, I've played bits and pieces of various snowboarding games.. I've done everything but snowboard myself. Considering I can't even stand up on a skateboard, I'll leave snowboarding to others. But that doesn't change the fact I've always loved snowboarding. So, when I was getting Jet Grind Radio at Best Buy, this game seemed to catch my eye. The $10 price tag caught it even more. So, I grabbed this, Jet Grind Radio, and some more stuff, and left the store rather satisfied. After getting my Dreamcast at Christmas, I put this game in after some JGR and MvC, only to find a few things. One, that the graphics were pretty nice. Two, that I loved the soundtrack. And three, the game was freakin hard to move from level to level in. After playing the game for about an hour straight, I finally managed to progress to the second level. By this point, I had decided to promptly scream every time I didn't even get to the end of the course. While I was busy hyperventilating from my anger, my friend called me, and I promptly went up to his house. So of course, what do you expect us to do? I take the disc for some reason, and we try multiplayer. By the end of the race he had decided he thought the game sucked, and I was trying to make myself believe that there was some redeeming value to the game. After that race, we hide the disc away in it's case, and play some Megaman X6. Now, this is how the game has been for me. I play hours of it, and finally unlock the next stage. Currently, I'm on stage four, trying to unlock the fifth stage. And I've had this since Christmas. There is extreme frustration when it takes two months to beat three courses.

You see, the game is rather odd. I still haven't figured out how to do tricks well, but what I know for tricks suffices. But here's one of the major killers to the game. You don't race anyone, you just race against the clock. This can get rather boring, and raises the frustration level, considering that there is really no chance the clock will hit a rock and fall for a second, unlike an opponent would, giving you the advantage randomly. So you can't ever win by luck, you've got to perfect yourself at the game to make much progress. The next annoying aspect to the game is how that it's so hard to get to the end of the course. You have to do huge sets of tricks off of certain jumps to get more time. Mess up on a trick cliff once and you'll run out of time, definitely. The game is very unforgiving in this whole area. I usually find myself finishing a course with less than ten seconds left. And that's when I finish the course, which is only a fractional amount of the time.

One of the better parts of the game was the soundtrack. With about nine tracks, it's really quite interesting. The music that gets played is chosen by the character whom you choose to use. This can be nice, but I would have preferred to be able to choose which track was playing at the time off the start menu. Such as in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. It's nice to choose what's playing at the time in a sports/racing game. Aside from that, the music is very wide ranging. And that's the thing. It's actually musical. Unlike most of the annoying sidescroller music on the SNES, or the stupid level music that gets repeated over and over in Sonic Shuffle, this actually has a real feel to it most of the time that keeps going, rather than just feeling repetitive. This was one of the things that I enjoyed so much about the game.

One of the confusing aspects of the game which I still don't understand fully is the control. It's obvious that you move the joystick to tilt your rider in a direction downhill, but I'd have appreciated a more complete set of directions as to how I'm supposed to do tricks for instance. I've got my button which I hit once or twice for some quick in the air tricks, I've got my jump, and I've got my ''block the tree'' button. That's another interesting thing about the game, Y is used to block a tree or object from hitting you and slowing you down. Sure, it's not going to destroy a building, but if you are running up to a tree that fell in the road, you hold Y. While holding it you can't turn, so make sure you're lined up okay for the time until you get to the tree. Now that you're lined up, hold Y. You'll go up to the tree and hit it, but not slow down a bit. You'll also hear the sound of a building being demolished and the tree flies away. Whatever. So, back to the whole controller. Then we have the two trigger buttons, and you have B. Don't ask me what B's supposed to do. The trigger buttons are supposed to be used while spinning I believe, but how I don't know. The game had very little instructions on how to do tricks, and consequently I had to figure out most all of the game on my own by luck.

The graphics are very nice. Very little slowdown, but what little slowdown exists is very noticeable. Infact, I've found places in the game in which I can jump, and it will move a frame a half second practically until I land. The graphics look very smooth, and very good. Infact, some of the better looking graphics I've seen for any Dreamcast game. Very nice looking.

Rundown:
Graphics - 7
Music - 8
Controls - 4
Difficulty - 8
Fun - 7

Last comment: Very frustrating and confusing, the game isn't something you can pick up and win a few races real fast. Find another snowboard game to meet your boarding needs, this one doesn't cut it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/19/02, Updated 02/19/02