Chill out man
Amped 3 revolves around earning enough cash and enough respect to advance the story. Your created character will become a major player in a five-act drama. Throughout your adventures, you'll travel from Northstar to Snowbird, and then to Valle Nevado, Avoriaz, Laax, and Zugspitze, among other hidden and back country locales. The international vibe of Amped 3 lends to a more dynamic story, and as with all of the previous installments of the series, each mountain is rendered with excellent detail and accuracy. If you're familiar with any of the hills in the game, you will recognize them when you play. Filling out the roles in Amped 3 is a cast of characters drawn from a variety of snowboarding types. Each character represents a unique style of snowboarding and can teach you their own particular variety of "awesomeness." As you get to know each character, their individual stories unfold in a startling array of graphic styles and approaches. Some characters' stories are animated in stylised Japanese style graphics, while others are done sketches reminiscent of the Grange Hill comic style intro.
Different challenges bring in all kinds of other graphic styles, ranging from all types of old-school arcade graphics to disturbingly well-done surreal CG sequences. Some elements even feature live-action video. The overall effect is as if you drank a whole bottle of Vodka and necked a couple of Prozac – it certainly goes a bit crazy at times.
Click for larger imageAll of these story-based changes and the wacky graphical style give Amped 3 a much-needed shot of personality. They have managed to find a few other ways to make this Amped different from its predecessors: Amped 3 features Xbox Live enabled leaderboards for every challenge on the mountain. In previous gaming generations, we shared our scores with those who came to challenge them on our own console, in our own house. But now, we can instantly see how we rank in the world of Xbox gamers, and that aspect of Amped is compelling. It would have been a nice addition to add actual live gameplay, but the leaderboard does encourage you to keep ‘carving’ and ‘buttering’ those slopes in a vane attempt to climb up the ladder. Chilling out on a virtual mountain with your buddies would clearly have been a great addition.
The control scheme has not been completely overhauled, but it has been refined and feels comfortable. In some respects, Amped 3 approaches the combo-zen of the Tony Hawk series, which is a very good thing in my book. The old method of "cocking" your spins has been ditched in favour of a more controlled spin in-air. Grabs are still performed by pressing he face buttons, but these now also handle a variety of other functions including "butter" tricks.
The notion of "Style" has been introduced in Amped 3. By resisting the urge to jam the analog joystick during a spin or flip, you can perform an extra slow rotation, and that will earn you bonus style modifiers. These dramatically increase the value of each trick combo, and they look really cool when you do it just right. The notion of "style" or "flow" is very important in snowboarding, and this addition provides incentive to perform visually appealing stunts.
