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Amped 2

Amped 2

Written by Brian Bohnert on 12/2/2003 for Xbox  
More On: Amped 2
Up until I got my Xbox, I was never really a big fan of snowboarding. To me, it was just one of the filler sports that ESPN2 airs between world’s strongest man competitions. That was until John loaned me a copy of SSX2:Tricky, and I was hooked almost immediately . There’s a certain visceral thrill to rushing downhill, especially when you know that you’re not going to suffer any broken bones if you smack into a tree or miss a landing. Needless to say, I was pretty stoked when Amped 2 came out

Amped 2 is the latest title from Microsoft Game Studios and like most sequels it builds on its predecessor. This year Microsoft has added some new tricks (including the “Butter” system which can be used to chain tricks together), new mountains, snow skates (think snow skateboard), 14 new professionals, and the biggest feature is that Amped 2 is now part of XSN Sports, which allows gamers to play online with your friends over Xbox Live.

I never had a chance to play the first Amped so this was my first exposure to the franchise. Right away I noticed that Amped 2 is much more technical a game than SSX. While there are still a lot of cool moves in the game, they are not as over the top as they are in SSX. The other big difference is that Amped 2’s sole focus is tricks, even in multiplayer, while the SSX series offers a race mode. It’'s still fun but the game feels a lot more technical.. Is this good or bad? It’s really up to what you are looking for in a game.

Amped 2 provides a lot of bang for the buck. The core of the single player side of the game is the career mode. You start by selecting your boarder’s profile (gender and look) and then selecting their stance (regular or goofy). The game allows you to build skills in two areas, player skills and boards skills. Player skills are earned by completing challenges while board skills are earned by winning the events in the game. The nice thing about board skills is that you can re-assign them during the game so if you need that boost to beat a challenge you can re-distribute your points to get the job done. You’ll need these skills as you complete a wide variety of challenges on the 14 different mountain areas in the game. The developers have done a nice job of creating an immersive world for you to explore. What I really dig is that almost everything on the mountain can be used in your tricks. Want to ride down the ski lift and jump off of it? Do it. Want to jib on that fallen tree? Do it.

With each mountain, there are several types of events for you to complete. In order to “own a mountain,” you have to complete three basic challenges…gaps, tricks, and snowman elimination. Tricks are five pre-set tricks that you have to accomplish on one mountain run. You can see what tricks you have to do by pressing the “start” button. As you would expect, the tricks get more and more difficult as you unlock different mountains. The gaps are five jumps on each mountain that you have to make. Sounds easy right? These jumps have to be made over large distances and you have to land without crashing. They are easy to find as each one is illustrated with a blue arc on the mountain. The final challenge is to hunt down and take out the snowmen that are hidden on the mountain. These challenges force you to explore the nooks of each mountain. The snowmen do make some sound so you will have some idea when they are in the area.These aren’t the only things to do on the mountain, as there are some other fun challenges to take part in. The first is the sponsor runs where you will try to impress a sponsor with trick-filled runs down the mountain. The catch is that you have to do the tricks they want to see (flips, spins, etc) and you have to do enough of them to get the sponsor excited during the entire run (which is displayed at the top of the screen in a bar ranging from “bored” to “amped”). The hard part is that you have to constantly do tricks during the run in order to keep the sponsor interested (which prevents you from landing one or two huge tricks at the top and coasting the rest of the way down). This can be frustrating as you can land several huge tricks at the top, only to lose the interest by either doing the wrong trick or accidentally doing a trick at the bottom that costs you the run.

Each mountain also has a set of photo shoots that you can participate in. Each shoot has you performing a high-difficulty trick in order to pass the challenge. These are pretty straightforward but most of them provide enough challenge where you’ll have to try them five or six times before you get by them.

Each mountain also has two sets of point scores that you will have to complete, high score and media scores. The high scores are the easiest. You simply have to score the required level of points on one run down the mountain. The media scores are points earned at special media sections of the mountain (which are highlighted by a red camera icon above the area), which forces you to know the mountain so you can plan a run that hits as many of these as possible.

You would think that would be enough but there are also competitive events. This isn’t a race down the mountain but rather a series of runs where you try to outscore the other boards. Once you have completed most of the items on a mountain you might befriend one of the pro snowboarders who will take you under his or her wing and take you on a run down the mountain. They’ll teach you new moves as well as help you to see how a real pro runs that mountain.

The sound in Amped 2 gets the job done but you’re not necessarily going to be firing this puppy up to listen to sounds of the snowboarding (unless the silent shushing of snowboarding helps you sleep). The basic sounds are all in the game, from the sounds of landing a flip to the thud of running head first into a tree. The game includes a wide variety of background songs for you to listen to but I was content to listen to the songs that I had ripped to my Xbox (nothing like snowboarding to Guns & Roses). You can control the music with the black and white buttons while you are snowboarding, which is a nice touch if you start to get sick of one song and don’t want to pop out of the game. The only really annoying sound is the voice of the tutorial guide and the media/bystanders on the mountain who offer you encouragement as you perform tricks. They are ok when you first start the game but after a few hours they get a little old.Where the game really exceeds expectations is the visuals. The graphics are excellent and really help pull you into the mountain. The trees, jumps, half-pipes, and chair lifts all look good and very realistic. Hell, one of the first things you have to learn is to focus on your boarder and not look up at the mountains, as the backgrounds are gorgeous and can be something of a distraction if you have a hard time focusing. The game moves at a nice high speed and I never really noticed any dropped frames. The only real problem I had with the graphics is that you can get lost in the trees a little too easily.

It took me a while to really get into Amped 2 as the controls are much different than the ones from SSX but once I got used to them I actually preferred themto the SSX controls. The left thumbstick controls the direction of your boarder while the right thumbstick determines which grabs you’ll perform when you jump. The A button is used for jumping/acceleration while the B button controls jibbing/railsliding, and the Y button controlls lip tricks. Once you get the snowskate, you’ll start using the X button which controls snowskate kick tricks. The left and right triggers switch the stance of your boarder.

Once you get used to them, the controls work well and allow you to attempt tricks easily. Notice, I said “attempt”, actually landing tricks is something that takes a lot of time and skill to do. At no time in the game did I feel like I was fighting the controls to perform a trick. It was more a battle against gravity.

The trick system in Amped 2 is also pretty tight. The biggest addition is the ability to perform “butters”. A butter is a ground trick where you boarder either balances on the nose or tail of the board. Why are butters important? They allow you to link tricks together to increase your score. Basically you could make a huge jump and then perform a butter to either another jump or a rail slide. It’s a good system but take some time to incorporate it into your repertoire of tricks. The rest of the tricks are fairly easy to attempt and the game does provide a serviceable tutorial to introduce you to the tricks. The tutorial is pretty solid but exceedingly strict. If you miss a trick doing the tutorials, you will need to restart the tutorial run. This is frustrating as there is very little wiggle room to really learn the tricks.

I have two main problems with the game. The first is the lack of any kind of racing mode. I like doing tricks as much as the next person (snowboarding tricks that is) but the lack of a race mode kind of hurts the game. Why? Well a race mode makes the game a little more accessible to non-gamers (i.e. girlfriends and people new to the franchise). It’s not a big deal if you know it going in but it’s something that would really add a lot to the game.

The other problem I ran into was that the game would occasionally get logged off of Xbox Live during the single player game and that would generate an error message. I have no idea why it logs into Xbox Live during the single player game but it was kind of annoying to have the box pop up in the middle of a run. I’m running Xbox Live connected to a wireless connection so you may not have this problem.

All in all Amped 2, is another solid snowboarding game. The single player modes are deep and will provide you with many, many hours of entertainment. It’s not perfect and hopefully some kind of race mode will be in the next version of the game. The other disappointing thing about the game is knowing that about half of the development team was let go after the game was shipped. I didn’t factor it into the score but this is becoming too common in the industry.
A solid, technical snowboarding game with fantastic visuals. Whether or not you like the game will depend on your tastes.

Rating: 8.5 Very Good

* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.


About Author

Odyssey2, Baby! That’s where it all began for me. Sure my friends all swore by their Atari 2600s, but to me there was nothing better than Pick Axe Pete or K.C. Munchkin! Intellivision? Colecovision? Please! Give me Artillery Duel and my trusty Bally Astrocade (which even by today’s standards might have had the best controllers of any console ever)! Commodore 64? Ha! We had the Atari ST! Ah, the good ole days...
Since then, I’ve owned and loved just about every major video game console and many, many PCs. These days, when I’m not at my day job as a software developer or scarring the crap out of my pets with my musical dis-arrangements, you can find me playing pretty much whatever the latest greatest FPS happens to be on PC or whatever game is in vogue on the latest consoles. (Although, I have been known to still fire up the old Oddysey2 emulator from time to time!)

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