Butter me up
Amped 3 inherits a somewhat troubled past. The series has its roots in the hey-day of snowboarding videogames when Cool Boarders still ruled atop a mountain of wannabes. Up until then, most snowboarding games had taken a fantasy-styled approach to the sport, and have generally felt somewhat cartoony. Then Amped and SSX came out at the dawn of the new gaming generation (which is now the previous generation). SSX embraced the fantasy angle of snowboarding games; it added dazzling visual effects and outlandish tricks and airs, mixing it all together with a greatest party hits soundtrack that made gamers flock to it. Of course, all that was on the PlayStation 2.
On the Xbox, developer Indie Built worked alongside Microsoft Game Studios and created a detailed snowboarding sim crafted with love: Amped is to Tricky as Gran Turismo is to Need for Speed. Although Amped never gained the critical acclaim or commercial success of its main rival, it did offer real-life snowboarders a quality simulation of their favorite thing. Fast-forward a generation, and we find Amped 3 at the front of the new next-gen pack, this time with publisher Take-Two in on the act. Amped 3 doesn’t stay true to their vision of creating a great snowboarding game for real snowboarders. This time out, Amped does feature a much better story mode with insane cinematic sequences. They exhibit qualities ranging from "great sense of humor" to "relatively psychotic," but the actual snowboarding element has been toned down, no longer do you need the fast reflexes in order to stay upright on your board, it almost feels permanently attached. Overall, the changes are for the better, and Amped 3 exhibits the most personality we've seen so far from the series. And what's better is that it manages to capture some true qualities of the social sphere surrounding the sport, making Amped 3 a fun and exciting way to spend an afternoon.
Click for larger imageThe general construction of Amped 3 will be familiar to anyone who has played the previous games. You create a character and hit the slopes, using a very nice mountain map as your guide to individual challenges on the mountain. These challenges are basically of a few types: story challenges advance the overall storyline; media challenges get you respect points and cash for completing big trick challenges at specific locations; skill-based challenges are just like they sound and earn respect points.
