1080° Snowboarding (1998)

1080 is a difficult game to fully enjoy due to its disparate elements - on the one hand, racing is mostly fun and engaging and learning how to manage each course's twists and turns is very rewarding. And on the other hand, the trick system is awkwardly implemented and feels poorly thought out.

There's no particular story to 1080 - the player selects one of five (initially, there are unlockables) snowboarders and a type of snowboard with various stats such as landing, technique, speed, and other values. The player may either race to the bottom of a track or do modes that involve snowboarding past flags and doing tricks.

Racing seems simple enough once the player knows the general snowboarding secret (always crouch, never jump) and balancing jumps and turns can be a little tricky (landing never quite feels 100% accurate) but it's very fun and fast to race down slopes and the player can run into their competitor and play a VS mode for more fun.

As for tricks, the player has a general set of direction + B button tricks that can do fun tricks where the player grabs the board and then spin tricks, which have very unintuitive notation and very finnicky requirements to pull off (if the player can stick the landing). A 720 can be managed as long as you know to hold down the buttons, rotate, then release but once the Z button gets thrown in as well as the landing it becomes extremely frustrating, and the nature of rotating the control stick doesn't work nearly as well as you think it should. Combining these two type of tricks results in a batch of samey but cool tricks and infuriating spin tricks that are more trouble than they're worth. Even the most trick-friendly snowboarder types struggle with these.

As for track visuals and audio, the soundtrack feels like a mix of high energy electronic and dance beats that could be mistaken for a Jet Grind Radio soundtrack. It's not as legendary but it's fun enough for racing background music. Visuals are where the game shines the most - snowy vistas are bright and well designed and the game has additional touches like time of day for specific tracks (the sunset version really shines in this one). Snowboarders have general "cool" designs but come off as a little bit generic.

1080 has some fun modes if you're willing to get into the tricky nature of snowboarding and landing, and some not fun modes unless you want to deal with a messy trick system. Stick to the fun modes and you should have a great time!

Slapping the 1080° Snowboarding cart into the 64 and flicking it on to be hit by the music and the announcer, then jumping into character select and getting hit with more music and style is just great. It’s immediately enjoyable. This is my fifth or sixth time coming back since I first rented it all those years ago and I know I’ll be back again many more times.

1080° Snowboarding can be a little bit tricky to get into at first, especially for me back when I was a kid. Despite its tone, big air and over the top courses this is a snowboarding game that leans more realistic. Steering your chosen character requires careful input and building an understanding of how this game plays and it is the same for landing jumps. You need to land properly and smoothly or you’ll be eating snow but when this game starts to click though it feels good. There is a tangible feeling here and resistance, you are not going to be zipping about like this is a really arcadey experience. There is a great sense of building up speed and during the big jumps there’s this sensation like you’re just hanging there for a moment. It’s not perfect but damn it’s impressive for a Nintendo 64 game that came before other notable snowboarding games.

Once you’re getting the hang of it the next step is to start learning the optimal route down these courses which are full of jumps, turns, mounds, different paths and a variety of obstacles and surfaces. The different surfaces, including things like, snow, softer deeper snow, ice, grass, roads, bridges, and more, change handling and speed. Jumps slow you and come with the risk of crashing but maybe you’ll clear something more hazardous or land on a better path down. Turns need to be mastered, obstacles efficiently moved through and around, you need to tuck as often as possible to maximise speed and you need to dodge the other character racing against you too. Once the game is clicking for you and you’ve got your preferred lines down now why not look cool while doing it and throw some tricks in. The tricks aren’t going to come to you super easily either and they are realistic too, not ridiculous over the top moves, and remember you still need to land smooth after those tricks. Learning this game and getting through it is just such a fun, satisfying little journey to have on a lazy afternoon.

But that’s also 1080° Snowboarding’s biggest flaw, you’ll get through it in an afternoon. Even if you fail a bunch of times you’ll still get through this in a few hours, but it is worth coming back to improve your times and scores. Having someone to compete with would help too. It is really light on content with a very small selection of characters, boards, modes, courses and music. The main mode is match race, which are groups of races divided into different difficulties. This game doesn’t mess around, you only get three fails before you’ll need to start the group of races again from the beginning. One crash can be enough to lose a race when the difficulty gets higher and the game has a damage meter, so if you take too many falls it’s over as well. The secondary mode is contest which is really good but disappointing that it wasn’t further expanded. In this mode you’re chasing score while worrying about a timer. You need to weave between flags for extra time and score, but you also need to hit as many tricks as you can to build score too. It’s the mode that brings everything together. There is a time attack, trick attack and training too. I would recommend starting in training. Finally you’ve got 2 player versus which is great to have but this leads me to the next biggest flaw.

1080° Snowboarding is simply held back by the limitations of the time and hardware. It only has two player split screen not four which would have been awesome. During single player races you only race one on one. Having at least four instead of just two would have really livened things up. Some more life in the courses would have been nice and if the opponent gets too far ahead they vanish and then just pop back into existence as you catch back up. 1080° Snowboarding slows down at times already so I doubt there was much more that could be done though. Despite this it is a nice looking game. The characters look good and courses are great with good variety in them. I love the style, the menus, the fonts and music too even though there isn’t enough of it. Snow kicks up as you turn hard, your board leaves its mark in the snow and lots of snow obscures your view when going through the taller, softer snow. If the sun is just at the right angle there is a lens flare and you can see your characters reflection in the ice. I still like the way this game looks after all these years and it’s impressive for the late 90s.

1080° Snowboarding is a great time and it would be one of the best Nintendo 64 games if it was further developed and it wasn’t so short and light on content. But being short and sweet is nice in a way too. If you have a Nintendo 64 then grab yourself a loose copy it is pretty affordable. If you can access it through the Switch then there is no reason not to try it. If 1080° Snowboarding doesn’t click with you then maybe try the follow up 1080° Avalanche or Snowboard Kids, Twisted Edge, Big Mountain, Cool Boarders, SSX, Amped, Rippin’ Riders, Dark Summit or Shaun Palmer's Pro Snowboarder. It’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone or maybe I just never expected to lose it.

7.9/10

I actually originally borrowed this game from my friend in the 90's. My brother and I destroyed all the high scores. Somehow I literally scored millions of points on the Big Air stage by button mashing 540s to 360s to 540s, it was insane!

By the time we returned the game to our friend he was TO'd that we had beaten all his high scores, and our controls were totally jacked from all the ariel tricks.

I recently found the game for $5 at the Deseret Industry (the "DI" for short). I have since lost my touch, but I still enjoy a quick race or time trial. Fun music, and the perfect game for the holidays, 10/10.