Preview
Get An Inside Look At Shaun White Snowboarding
June 03, 2008
After racking up X-Game and Olympic gold and one terrible American Express card commercial, the Flying Tomato will get his own videogame courtesy of Ubisoft Montreal this holiday season. Two teams are cranking out dual versions of Shaun White Snowboarding–one focused on the next gen title and a second dedicated to the Wii (and Nintendo’s new Wii Fit balance board).
“Shaun was a huge fan of the Prince of Persia games, which is how we became involved in this project,” explained lead designer for the next-gen version Thomas Simon in our interview during Ubidays ‘08 in Paris. “He’s been involved in every aspect of this game over the past two years from choosing the soundtrack to co-writing the script to providing voice over for the game.”
White provided a video greeting to the 1,200 journalists gathered to gawk at the big screens over the course of Ubi’s event, saying he was nervous about showing the game to press for the first time, but that he hoped everyone liked the game. From the hands-on time on both versions, Ubisoft looks like it finally has a winner in the sports category. And the timing couldn’t be more perfect with no other snowboarding game announced for this fall.
White’s directive to the development team, which used the Assassin’s Creed engine to bring the four distinct mountain ranges to life, was to go for “exaggerated realism” with the gameplay. The result is an experience more like the Amped franchise than the arcade tricks of SSX.
“Anything you can do on a snowboard in real life, you can do in this game,” said Simon. “We’re using the analog stick to spin which really changes what you can do on the board. There are tons of surface tricks you can pull off.”
Taking a page from Activision’s Tony Hawk-endorsed games, Shaun White Snowboarding will make use of every button on the controller (including the PS3’s SIXAXIS motion sensor) and offer multiple layers to each trick. For example, there will be four layers of grabs in the game, each one more complex. White, who’ll appear throughout the game in video and polygonal form, will hand players new abilities like Big Air as the game progresses.
Like the aforementioned Amped franchise, this entire game will be available online (for 16 to 32 players depending on how far Ubisoft pushes the technology), which means gamers will be able to gather on virtual mountains in Alaska, Japan, Europe or Park City, Utah. In addition to staples like slope style competitions and half-pipes, there’s a death race that allows boarders to check opponents into walls and throw snowballs at them to make them wipe out.
The Wii game offers a completely different experience, allowing gamers to take off their shoes and make use of the new balance board. Some of the in-game moves will be performed physically, while others will use the Remote controller. To perform a flying squirrel, the player must physically pretend he’s hula-hooping to get his avatar’s trick just right.
In addition to having more locales than the next gen game, including mountains in Chile and Canada, the Wii game offers a world tour gameplay style that sends players from one resort to the next on an ultimate road trip in search of White. The game supports both cooperative and competitive multiplayer, although only one player will be able to make use of the balance board in any mode.
Tech has come a long way since White’s first videogame, Sony’s Cool Boarders 4 on PlayStation–a game he helped work on at the age of 14. Ubisoft’s taking this extreme sport seriously and with the photorealistic visuals and the deep gameplay and trick-based systems, both of these snowboarding games are solid first efforts from an acclaimed studio not known for sports titles.
–John Gaudiosi
