Shaun White Snowboarding

Otherwise known as ‘The Flying Tomato’ for his curly ginger locks, Shaun White is already a skateboarderturned- Olympic snowboarding legend at the tender age of 26 – and you don’t get to play him in this officially endorsed snowboarding title from Ubisoft. At least not until you’re good anyway. Besides the fact that the gold medallist wouldn’t want cack-handed noob gamers making his avatar look like a lame snow bunny in front of all his virtual peers, he wouldn’t want cack-handed PC gamers making his avatar look like an utter wally in front of his virtual peers: because using mouse and keyboard for Shaun White Snowboarding is a bad idea. No matter how big an advocate you are of native PC peripherals, a 360 pad is far more practical for this type of game. Sliding your hands across the keyboard to pull off tricks is more trouble than it’s worth, and using thumbsticks for spins and grabs is far more intuitive than a digital keystroke.

It looks like a 2004 PC title and even the lauded Scimitar engine fails to save it from technical mediocrity. The only obvious facet of the technically excellent Assassin’s Creed we saw in Shaun White Snowboarding was the slightly annoying character collision detection, which has crowds of NPCs reeling politely back at the slightest contact, only to move forward and repeat the process all over again until they manage to fluke their way out of it.

Yet despite failing the high standards of PC gaming in several criteria, Shaun White isn’t a bad game. Tearing down a slope and pulling a 360-degree spinning nose-grab off a ramp and landing it is as entertaining as its ever been. If you can really be bothered, you can hook yourself up to a LAN with up to eight other players. There’s nothing that makes it stand out from any other snowboarding title, but it’s progressive and very accessible. If you can put your PC purist leanings aside, you could do worse than this snowy excursion.