Supreme Snowboarding

<p>Supreme Snowboarding<P><br>Supreme Snowboarding is an offering from Housmarque, the Finnish developers behind the Stardust games way back in the days of the Amiga. This snowboarding game is about as far removed from Stardust as you can get, however it retains the hallmarks of Housemarque featuring as it does eyepoping graphics. <br><br>Graphically Supreme Snowboarding is, well supreme actually, featuring some amazing lighting effects, as well as full 24bit textures and excellent snow effects. This puts 1080 in the shade, although quite frankly that's to be expected, however does it manage to beat 1080 in the more important area of gameplay? Well, no, 1080 is still the best snowboarding game on any format, however on the PC Supreme Snowboarding is king, and if it wasn't for a few niggles it may have overtaken 1080 as the best on any format.<br><br>Where 1080 excels is with it's great control system, unfortunately being a PC game Supreme Snowboarding has the problem that there is no standard control. Playing this game on a keyboard or digital joypad just doesn't cut it, analogue control is really a must if you are serious about this game, and if you don't have a decent joystick then the experience will be difficult at least. Where Supreme succeeds is with it's jumping device, you hold down a button, and whilst holding it down you decide the height, spin and whether you do a back or forward flip, it sounds complicated, but in practice it works very well. Doing grabs is easy as well, just press a button and direction whilst in the air, and then land, simple, effective.<br><br>There are nine courses in Supreme Snowboarding, over three locations with three courses in each locale. You can also choose what time of day you race at, with the dusk setting being practically stunning (if you liked Golden Forest you will love it!), the night setting is amazing for seeing how many lighting effects Housmarque have managed to get into a snowboarding game. All of your standard options are here, arcade, practice, stunt and championships they are all well executed. One very strange aspect of Supreme Snowboarding is the characters, in particular the character called 'Keith'. On first glance I thought that this chap looked very similar to Keith Flint from The Prodigy, and lo an behold when I started a race the announcer did in fact say 'Keith Glint', very similar, very odd, but it is rather interesting nonetheless.<br><br>Aside from my gripes about the control method, there are two more things that annoy me about this game, and stop it from reaching the heights of Nintendo's cool classic. The first grip is when the boarders fall over. When they are riding along, and pulling tricks they look great, animation is top notch, when they crash they do so with great animation, why then after all the effort that has gone into the animation do they just pop up and land back on the course? Surely it would be possible to give them a recovery animation, this really does break the atmosphere. Secondly there is the unexplainable crashes. For instance you will be going along down the slope, and you will go slightly off the snow, onto what appears to be rocks, now no matter how flat the surface, you will fall over. This is annoying because in other parts of the game you go along roads, and falling over when you go slightly off the snow is very annoying, and limiting as the courses are huge and your exploration is really limited.<br><br>Although my gripes are small, they are big enough to stop this from being a classic snowboarding game, but as it is Supreme Snowboarding is technically the most impressive of its genre, and in the playability steaks it is second only to the masterpiece that is 1080.<br><br>Hopefully the Dreamcast version will correct these small flaws and finally topple 1080.