Stoked

"Looks bad, plays bad, even sounds bad. It's an accepted first try by the "Bongfish" team who might be getting too much encouragement."

I see that many people enjoy this game and I can respect that, but the game I played for about 6 hours (I'm honest here) is... it's unbelievably poor. How people see this game as anything over a 7 (Yea, maybe if you're 14 this game is a 7) is painful. Snowboarding games aren't going to become what Skate 2 is unless you call them out on being old and stale. I know the developers aren't super rich or anything, but this game can't even compete with XBox 1 snowboarding games, or even 1080 Snowboarding for N64.

I'll start with the audio.

There's plenty of music, but most of it is not my bag. The sound effects usually seem out of place and are extremely exaggerated (ie, riding on powder usually sounds like riding on ice). They added a lot of voice acting which is rather expected - voices are going to say, "Whoa, you call that style?" and "I don't know, that was just BAD!" It got old very fast for me.

Next we'll read about graphics.

It's basically all low quality or at least, below average (The falling snow is white balls that fly everywhere). The mountains in the distance look like a paper mache of plain white until you get closer and then fuzzy green trees pop in. The landscape is littered with log cabins or stone structures in ruins that you sometimes need to trick on or off of, but the layout sometimes is so ridiculous that you'll finish your grind or trick and slam into another structure but still somehow be unaffected and land the trick. The snow that is blasted around by riding over it looks like 5 V's and very blocky. Perhaps the torrent of bad visual quality would be hidden slightly by playing on an old TV and in broad daylight.

Next is gameplay.

Pretty much all the animations are crumbly and cheap. All the basic grabs (LT+ upright w/ RThumb, RT + left w/ RThumb) are astoundingly weak and the rider shows no style whatsoever (You'd think that the Method, the most stylish grab, would be awesome in any game, well in Stoked the rider stays pretty much 100% compact and doesn't tweak out a single basic grab, even the Japan Air looks nearly identical to the plain Mute.

Carving looks weak and old, and the incredibly deformed and wrinkly mountains will cause your rider to change direction very often. Landing not straight or somewhat sideways will make your rider shoot off in that new direction as if the snow was a banked left turn in NASCAR, but often times landing perpendicular from your take-off pointed causes your to fall and your rider will have huge blotches of white on him when he recovers. Snow is supposed to be slippery, but the snow in Stoked is more like coarse pavement.

The controls are pretty messy and may have been thought up in about 20 seconds, it's basically the same as Skate, but with a minor tweak to ollieing, the addition of prewinding your spins via left/right trigger, and the lack of function for A,B,X, and Y. Also, more grabs are added as I said before, but hey, they basically all look the same, there's no style in them. As for the ollies, the rider shoots up into the air and then does the ollie animation, so you have broken ollie animations right off the bat that look like they were coded before the first Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

The game takes landings very seriously. In all challenges you need to focus on landing as straight as possible or you'll loose out on approximately half your points. All the score goals (which is what the game is basically made of) are set fairly high and you'll be hitting the back button to start over "again and again and again x2."

The pro challenges have you following a rider who's score is pre-set at lets say 12533. It doesn't matter if you pass him or he passes you, what matters is that you need to do the tricks displayed in the corner of the screen and then pass through the first gate which will give you another set of tricks to do before you get to the next gate. The main problem is that you have to remember which tricks are coming because they often put a gate right before the lip of a jump. I'm using the first pro challenge as an example and what's also important in this game is that you hold your grabs all the way to the very last nano-second before you land which causes there to be no animation between holding your grab in the air and riding, and this, in my opinion, helps to ruin the game even more by limiting your own style and preferences on how to do tricks. Stoked is filled to the brim with poor designing and gameplay.

Summary time.

I'm not very stoked about this game, it looks bad, plays bad, and even sounds bad. It might have been good in 2002 or maybe even before that and on the PSX - all the textures look about that old but in high resolution. Everything in this game is hugely outdated. What's amazing is that in my opinion, Amped 1 is better, SSX3 is better, SSX On Tour is better, 1080 Snowboarding (Ahead of it's time) is better. I haven't played online where you can race people, but the gameplay is so awful that I can't wait to go back to racing in Forza 2. The best thing about Stoked is that it makes Skate 2 look like a perfect ten, which if you've done your homework is actually an 8/10. The second best thing about Stoked is that it's already $39.99. The third best thing about Stoked is perhaps it's presentation/menus. If you absolutely need to play this game then go ahead, but it's probably time to move on.

Miscellaneous notes:
I have a nice HDTV with great visuals running at 720p/1080i.
I have a nice sound system, but I often just use the TV speakers unless I play RB2.
I'm not trying to make anyone mad or post false info, so please don't get on my back.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/04/09, Updated 03/05/09

Game Release: Stoked (US, 02/26/09)