Freestyle Boardin', developer by TV Tokyo/Pony Canyon (not Capcom), is the latest in mediocre, thrill-free snowboarders that appear intent on crowding the snowboarding market until it's crushed under its own heaving weight. As one of six enormously different boarders, you take to the hills with a radical attitude and a chance to improve on your so-called ability to actually snowboard. In doing so, each of the boarders earns points that can be attributed to their attributes after each run. Created with a mixture of polygons and sprites, Freestyle Boardin' offers a third-person perspective, one- to two-player gameplay options, and dual shock analog control.
Gameplay
When you buy a snowboarding game, you want to feel like you're actually snowboarding and pull off tricks unlike in real life. At least that's our assumption. In Freestyle Boardin', the sense of snowboarding is more like ice skating on concrete, with torn up tissue paper appearing like a visible fart for snow behind you. You're actually feel as if you're magnetized to the snow like a Magnavox car, or like the cars in Extreme-G, surprisingly just the opposite of snowboarding. Hell, you feel as if you're on in a well on a one-way bucket straight to hell. In other words, if you want to feel the snowboard cutting through the soft powdery snow, well you've just arrived at the house of pain.
Tricks
In addition to not feeling like a snowboarding game, the biggest dilemma in Freestyle is the way in which techniques are pulled off. Despite taking the time to learning the litany of moves ¿ and even mastering them ¿ you'll never feel secure in pulling them off in a heated race. Why? Because you can never pull them off the same way twice. To run through a trick-race combo race is to put your life in the hands of a hang gliding maggot, or a pile of dung to be born with an IQ or more than 3, or to see Pikachu appear in a game on PlayStation. Aggravating isn't the word, that's too nice. So, if you throw your controller on a regular basis because of frustration, with Freestyle Boardin' you'll surely light it fire in a bonfire of satanic proportions.
The several features and cast of characters aren't even worth mentioning, but if you want an inkling of how it feels, check out the very first snowboarding game, Cool Boarders, and subtract the fun.
Graphics
Freestyle Boardin' pays little attention to looks. The graphics here demonstrate brilliant first-wave PlayStation graphics and animation. Awesome videogame graphics in the year 1929. The snow from your board, as we've not so politely said before, looks like merde, sprite-based and unconvincing. The pop-in is standard for, say, Daytona USA in 1996 on Saturn (which is to say miserable), and the clipping is as prominent as a prostitute on Hollywood and Vine.
Sound
Well, here's where the game really grows on you. The standard well-known alternative bands that normally appear in snowboardin' games have been replaced with generic funk, loopy alternative songs, and forgettable AM tunes that aren't as bad as the gameplay, which is to say they aren't all-out terrible. The sound effects are also so standard and dull that the game would be just as fun to play with absolutely no sound whatsoever. In short, the sound and the sound effects blow.
In the end, gamers like myself ponder the forces that be every now and again. We wonder who will make the next great game, what will be the next great genre-bending title, and how the shape of games will be in the year 2000 and beyond. When a game like Freestyle Boardin' appears, we wonder why. Why? Why did Capcom create this...thing? Snobo Kids rocks this game's world. Side by side, Cosmic Race is a Picasso. Frickin' EA's lousy Rushdown is a like a PlayStation 2 demo in comparison. Even the dump sites in New Jersey wouldn't accept this slight on Punky Skunk, a brilliant whim of innovation and creativity compared to Freestyle Boardin'. In short, the only way to validate a purchase of this game is to buy it used and give it your greatest enemy. And that's only if you're in the mood.
Douglass Perry