Amped 3
I have to admit that the world of snowboarding is a bit of a grey area for me… I’ve done it before but I just can’t afford to go clangering off to the slopes every year to slide down hard packed snow on a skateboard with no wheels. I watch the extreme sports shows on TV and wonder just how bored with life you have to be to want to hurl yourself off a 500 foot drop with nothing but a few feet of snow and scattered rocks below to break your fall… But now I think I’m stating to see why people love it…
2K Games Amped 3 for the Xbox 360 not only gives you a decent snow surfing experience, it also superbly lampoons the whole snowboarding culture too making for a brilliantly enjoyable and easily playable game. Reading the manual helps things progress a bit quicker but its definitely only an option and not a necessity. From the start you can customise your boarder to look however you want, and as you can see if you hit the image below and download the video, you can get a radical as you fancy.
Click to download videoThe controls are mostly intuitive and in now time at all you’ll be grabbing some ‘phat’ air and within a few minutes you’ll know what a backside 720 melon with flip off is… (not that I still have any clue) and you’ll soon be talking that universal language boarders and surfers share, making you welcome from St Moritz to California…
The game itself is broken up by story episodes, training episodes and photo ops and challenges, all of which serve in the common goal of earning you bread for your boarding lifestyle… Many of the story sections double up as training sessions too, and are pretty much always preceeded by truly hysterical stop-motion live action cut-scenes. By stop-motion live-action, I mean its real animation using real props and models… but done in such an absurd, over the top fashion as to have you laughing out loud.
Amped 3 is out now on the Xbox 360 and you can expect a full review very soon.
