Best Snowboarding Game of All Time? Amped 2 Review (Xbox)!

Short version: Amped 2 came out on the original Xbox in 2003, and it’s a pretty legit snowboarding sim built around style points and a two-stick control scheme. It’s packed with events, from sponsor challenges and photoshoots to pro challenges and contests. The snow skating is the weakest part, but it’s my favorite snowboarding game so far and it still holds up really well.

It’s winter, and although I’m a skateboarding channel 98% of the time, I thought it would be cool to look at some snowboarding stuff. Growing up, I played a lot of skateboarding games, but also BMX, snowboarding and even inline. Anything trick-based. And the best snowboarding game that I’ve found in all of this time is Amped 2. What makes it so great? Let’s take a look.

It came out on the Xbox in 2003, and it’s a pretty legit sim. I’m convinced that the Skate series was at least partially inspired by this game. It’s all about realism and style, but there’s still a lot of personality.

Style points

The thing about snowboarding in particular is that you can get a ton of air time. In a video game, that means you can do completely ridiculous spins and flips, so it’s harder to find balance in the gameplay. Here’s how Amped 2 handles it.

The meter at the bottom of the screen is your style points, and they’re hugely important. You can do the same trick twice and score 20 times more points if you do it with style. Basically, you just have to do the trick smooth and slow, and use up all your air time. So if you do a really quick 720 and stop dead in the air, it won’t be worth as much as a slow, controlled 540.

On top of that, you can tweak out grabs for extra style, and if you land flat and straight, you’ll get extra points for “stomping” a trick. You can slowly spin on rails for style points there too.

This system is a great way to keep the game realistic and still challenging. But it only works because of the amazing control scheme.

Controls

In general, the left stick controls your body, and the right stick controls your hand. So if you hold up on both sticks, you’ll do a front flip and a nose grab. When you let go of the right stick, you let go of the grab.

It works really well, but there’s more to it. While grabbing, you can hit the triggers to tweak it out in different ways. If you hold up-left in regular stance, you’ll do a melon. The left trigger will tweak that into a crooked cop, the right trigger does a palm grab, and holding both will do a method. Counting all the different grabs and tweaks, there are 24 different tricks to do.

And that’s not all the triggers do. If you’re not grabbing, they twist your board left and right. You can use that to land in a specific grind if you’re not at the right angle, or you can save a spin that wasn’t going to land straight. Since you don’t want to speed up or slow down in the air and lose style points, you can let go of your grab and twist at the last second.

All of this adds up to a game engine that’s really fluid and fun to play with, even without anything to do. But there are a ton of different events to try.

Runs, gaps and the snowmen

There are only a handful of mountains in the game, but there are different runs and different event types to do at each one.

The basic run gives you some stuff to do: a basic high score, and a high media score, which only counts tricks you do while being filmed. So you have to make an effort to hit the right ramps and rails to get points toward that.

There are also a few tricks you have to do. It’s either a specific trick, or a score to reach doing something basic.

There are also gaps, which are marked by sparkling lines. They’re easy to find, but not so easy to do. It’s tough to tell exactly where you have to land, and you only get one shot per run, so it’s kind of a pain if you have to try it again.

The last thing is the one you’ll never forget. The thing that will haunt your dreams. The thing I still hear in my head, 13 years after the game came out. These horrible, possessed snowmen that you have to hunt down and kill. There are 8 of them in each level, and they’re hiding everywhere. The only way to find them is to listen for their annoying voices and insults.

“Hey Amigo!”

“Figaro! Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro Figaro!”

It’s incredibly satisfying to destroy one of these pieces of crap. But more often than not, they get the last laugh. They’ll be between ramps or behind fences, and you’ll just barely miss them on your run. Being a snowboard game, you can’t just turn around and take another shot at it. Oh no. You just have to remember where it was, then restart the whole run and try again. So many times I slipped or turned just a little bit at the wrong time and missed, only to hear it cackle at me as I desperately tried to turn and hit it. But it never worked.

Sponsors, photoshoots and pros

After you’re done with the generic challenges, there are also sponsor challenges. Each sponsor has a certain type of trick he wants to see: stylish aerials, long rails, long butters… you name it. You’ll get him amped by doing that stuff, but lose points for doing other kinds of tricks. Their voices get annoying when you have to redo one a few times, but it’s not too bad. The stuff they give you is pretty funny. It starts off with a piece of pizza or a pair of socks, but it gets better as the game goes on.

Next are the photoshoots. You’re dropped at a spot with rings, and you have to go through them all while getting a certain score. These are probably the hardest part of the game. Sometimes your stats just aren’t right for the challenge. You might not be able to make the gap all the way, or you might overshoot something. But it’s always possible, with enough patience. You can save your replays, but it was 2003, so you couldn’t edit them and upload them like in Skate. That would have been awesome, though.

Next up are the pro challenges. You follow a real-life pro snowboarder and you have to one-up all of their tricks. They’re all voiced by the real people, and they all have an annoying catchphrase you’ll hear over and over.

“Oh! No more shrimp on the barbie for you!”

It gets really annoying. Luckily, these aren’t too hard. When you win, you usually unlock something, like a new tweak.

Contests

The last major challenge type is the contests, or events. These are pretty basic, but you’ve got things like highest score, biggest combo, most media points and that kind of stuff. You have to do enough challenges to rank high and get invited. These can be a little annoying because there are other people that you’ll run into, but they’re not too bad.

When you beat these, you unlock more stuff, like the pro videos. Pros talk about getting sponsors, filming your first video part and all kinds of topics like that. I’m not all that interested in the snowboard industry, but it’s cool that they give you all this stuff at least.

Snow skating

One thing that really drew me to this game was the snow skating. I never got into snowboarding because I lived in Michigan. There’s tons of snow, but not a lot of mountains. If you want to go, it’s an all-day trip, and it gets expensive. I loved snow skating, though. I made all kinds of little ramps and slider bars and stuff like that. I would do flip tricks off of a little ledge I made with my skate box. It was a good way to pass the long Michigan winters. So when I saw that in a video game, I was blown away and I had to try it.

As much as I loved it when it was new, the snow skating is probably the weakest part of the game. It’s just an add-on, and it’s not really taken too seriously. The thing is, you don’t really snowskate down a mountain. Sure, some people do, but at that point you might as well just snowboard. The cool thing about snowskating is being able to do skateboard tricks on rails and do flip tricks. The game doesn’t really take advantage of that.

The Sk8 runs (S-K-8, because it was 2003) are just the same thing as the snowboard runs. You can ride through deep snow and rocks and all that kind of stuff. The only real gameplay difference is that you have to grab when you do body flips, for obvious reasons, and you can do flip tricks.

Do you use the joystick in Tony Hawk games? Yeah, I don’t either. It’s just not as precise when you want to do a specific trick. But this game is designed around using the joysticks, and the controls are the same as the snowboarding. It’s all implemented kind of lazily.

Here’s how it works. You hit a direction, and then hit X to do a flip trick. But since the joystick also spins you, you’ll often find yourself spinning a little bit and bailing. And it’s worse when you do up or down directions, because you’ll start to do a backflip, and you’ll bail because you didn’t grab.

Why are impossibles in this game? I know some people do them on snowskates, but it’s not common at all because it’s so hard to get the vertical pop. You can even do a front foot impossible, but not a 360 flip, varial heelflip, hardflip or any of that more basic stuff.

It doesn’t really matter, though, because it controls so weird that you’ll end up just riding around and doing grabs and spins like a snowboard to get enough points.

I give them props for putting this in the game, because it was still pretty new at the time, but I wish they took it more seriously.

Is Amped 2 worth playing today?

So that’s Amped 2. It’s not perfect, but it’s my favorite snowboarding game so far, and it still holds up really well. The graphics are still good, and the gameplay is still solid. If you still have an original Xbox, give it a try. But remove your clock capacitor first. If you don’t know about that, they explode in the original systems and leak acid all over the place. There’s info about that online.

There was a sequel on the 360, Amped 3, but it wasn’t nearly as good. I don’t remember it that much, and I don’t have a 360 to play it on these days. But reviews from that time weren’t great, so I think it’s safe to say 2 was the best in the series.

If you know of any other games with snow skating in them, I’ve always been curious. As for other snowboarding games, a few people said they loved 1080 on the N64, which I still haven’t played. For more snowboarding on the site, there are my reviews of Cool Boarders 2 and Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder.