Snnnooowwwboard Kids!
The is pure class! Came out on the N64 around 1997, and was often described as Mario kart on snow.
Which was exactly what it was. You picked a character and then raced down the tracks, pulling off stunts to get coins or even picking them up. On every stage there was a number of two coloured boxes. Red or Blue. Hitting the red boxes cost you 1 coin and got you an attack weapon. Hitting a blue box cost you 1 coin as well but got you a defensive weapon. You could have two weapons at once, one for each colour at your disposal.
Hitting a box when you had no coins meant you stopped dead, so it was all about thinking if you had coins.
Many of the weapons were very similar to mario, shells were replaced with snowballs, bananas with rocks but they all worked well and had their good and bad points.
Racing down the mountain was always fast, there were some section that were flat which meant if you got hit it'd take you ages to move on, but this was all part of the stratagy in multiplayer. When you reached the bottom is was a scramble to get onto the lift so you could be taken back up for the next lap. This is where races were one and lost, you may have got to the lift first, but someone knocked you over just before you got on meant you could go from 1st to last in a matter of seconds.
The graphics were great and still are, bright and colourful and extreamly solid. There was often a lot of background detail going on from penguins getting in your way to falling rocks.
The sound was great too, from the cartoony effects, to the music, it realy was sublime. The tunes really added to the game and made it feel special, its hard to describe how well fitting with they game they are.
But multiplayer, this was the king. As mentioned before, the lift scrambels were so much fun, see your 3 mates getting near the lift, you had the frying pan weapon, use it, squash them and get to the lift first while they strugle to get up. Or even just before the finish line, a well aimed weapon could knock them over while you sail past. It really did shine in multiplayer, even though it was just standard racing, stuck with 3 friends around you, this was one of the best multiplayer experience going. When ever i used to play it with mates, someone would always be the fat kid, who was very fast but could hardly move, and that was just halarious, especially the speech samples.
I demand a remake or a 3rd game to appear! Sadly the second one never came out in the UK but did in america.
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