Of all the things I ended up doing after I became a parent that I never dreamed I’d be doing beforehand, the one I didn’t see coming more than anything else was snowboarding! Actually, apart from standing around – mainly for thousands of hours watching academy football – I don’t think I actually did a lot else but you get the point! Anyway, our son was born in March 2006, and a couple of years later, when other parents were probably already fretting about how much TV their kids shouldn’t be watching, ours showed barely any interest whatsoever! Not that any of us were particularly telly addicts but it was usually on in the background, and one such time, Ski Sunday on the BBC happened to come on, and suddenly he stopped whatever chaos he was causing elsewhere and just stood and stared at it, totally transfixed! A year or so later again – I guess when he was about three – he started skiing every Sunday on a real snow indoor slope not far from us in Milton Keynes, and as it turned out would be the case with anything sporty from that point onwards, he was soon as good as they could teach him to be at that age, and simply biding his time until he was old enough to get on a snowboard…

In the meantime, the chat about going proper skiing was increasing to the point of inevitability, and while my wife had been on skiing holidays when she was a kid, I’d never even tried but was fully aware that after a horrific football injury a few years before, there was no way what they’d left me of my knee ligaments after several operations were up to skis anyway but, of course, at the age of thirty-eight, I was more than old enough for a snowboard! Not that one of those would have been in any way appealing to me otherwise either but needs must, so for my upcoming birthday that year, I ended up fully kitted out and with a literal one-day crash course booked… And it nearly killed me! Okay, I am far more fit and healthy now at fifty-two as I write than I was back then but even so, I really wasn’t expecting it to be so bad that I had to stop to give my poor legs and feet a rest from pressing down on the pedals during the twenty-minute drive back home! Anyway, as might be evident from the picture above, I sweated like a pig all day despite the stupid snow being pumped in but all the same, by the end I knew what I was doing, even if it was going to take a lot more practice to be able to do it even vaguely competently!

Our first week in Zell-am-See in Austria, in February 2012, nearly killed me too – bad enough limping home in my car then crashing out on the sofa and forgetting all about it until the next time but now we’re talking real mountains, negotiating all kinds of ski lifts (which were never meant for snowboards in the first place and I dread to this day), thousands of other people to worry about, and far more opportunity for pain every time you fall down, which is a constant, and then you have to get up the next day and do it all over again and again and again! Enforced absences in 2020 aside though, we’ve been going every year ever since, so it can’t be all bad, and I do look back now and wonder how I ended up in such a state but I’m sure I’m not the only one! And with our son now approaching eighteen as I write, and preparing to head off to play football in America, I guess that’s probably that’s probably about it for those holidays as they’ve been until now, but there’s always other ways to get a snowboarding fix…

Despite never having been interested in the real thing previously, I was clearly interested enough to own Cool Boarders and its sequel on the original PlayStation, and I enjoyed them a lot, and still go back for a game whenever I notice them on the shelf, but nowhere near as much as I enjoyed the SSX games, which I’ve really loved since the first one arrived on launch-day with my PlayStation 2, and I’d count SSX3 (pictured above) as one of my top twenty favourite games of all time, and probably all the snowboarding I thought I’d ever need too! But at some point in the interim, along came MAME, and from there, eventually, along came Snowboard Championship too! I’ve honestly no recollection of exactly when that was but I reckon around 2018, and I imagine the name just jumped out at me from whatever bunch of arcade stuff I was perusing at the time. I don’t think I’d ever even heard of it before though, and I’m sure I’d never seen the arcade cabinet in the wild after its original 1996 release by Gaelco, although I was familiar with their World Rally games, which I’m sure we’ll come back to shortly! Just to close on my own history with it though, I should also mention I am now playing it far more legitimately since its release on Evercade in 2021 as part of the Gaelco Arcade Collection 1! That collection is also worth highlighting as including what I think was the first official home release of Snowboard Championship, and the same for the aforementioned World Rally, which Gaelco originally released in 1993, and until far more recently, was a total nightmare to try and get running using emulation because of the wild anti-piracy measures they stuck in it, which their co-founder eventually shared the encryption keys for so it could finally be made available to play again!

And while the two games have different developers, with Zigurat for World Rally and OMK for Snowboard Championship, there’s a clear Gaelco lineage from one to the other there, from their trademark level of polish to the simple fact they’re both isometric, top-down, one-button racing games… One just has a lot more snow than the other! Before we get too far into the game, I want to get a couple of things out of the way… Firstly, there are loads of different courses spread across three event types and two difficulty levels but all the same, as much as I think it’s fantastic, I really don’t think there’s going to be that much I can say about Snowboard Championship now it’s come down to actually writing about it, rather than about me! Secondly the attract mode stinks! It starts out with this oversized shape rocking back and forth against a psychedelic background, which is obviously supposed to be the silhouette of a rider about to head out of a start gate, but it’s hardly attractive! And the “cinematic” that follows isn’t much better – it looks like a zoomed-in version of a few seconds of gameplay, and you really don’t want to be zooming-in on a 384 x 250 bunch of pixels from 1993! In reality, it’s a custom animation but again, hardly attractive! Not a drop of sound either, which is in total contrast to the fast-paced, hard rock level select you’re presented with next, or the typically “extreme” commentator counting you down once you’ve chosen, or the more laid-back, ZZ-Top-like, riff-heavy, electro bass-driven anthem dragging you down the mountain as you whoop and holler and “okay” your way along to the sounds of the edge of your board in the snow and all those cheering crowds!

The crowds are another highlight too, full of individuals and way more colour and detail and personality than you’d normally get in a bunch of video game onlookers. They’ve got proper haircuts and backwards caps, authentically nineties ski gear, lumberjack shirts, waving arms, waving clipboards in the arms of the race officials, cameramen realistically following the action, and even proper snowmen being built while everyone else waits for some action to come past! I’ll come back to how everything else looks in a bit though because we should quickly cover those two difficulty levels, one of which is called Speed, for beginners, and one is called Combined, for “champions,” although beat the qualification time in enough races and there’s not much between either of them. The main difference from the outset is given away by the names though, with Speed focussing on taking you down a relatively wide, relatively straightforward regular course with a few ramps and tricks to negotiate for bonus time, all against the clock, which is typically fifty seconds. Combined, on the other hand, will almost immediately introduce the two other course types, where Giant Slalom has you going between these pennant-style flags in the ground, while Special Slalom has you going between more traditional square flags on two poles like you’d usually see in one of these races.

Both the slalom events are intrinsically more difficult as standard, demanding more accuracy than simply not crashing, but Special Slalom courses also tend to be steeper and narrower, and with almost no leeway for clipping the edges of the flags. The Speed events will eventually incorporate both of these race types too but we’re talking a good ten tracks or so in before Giant Slalom events start appearing, and about fifteen before you get a Special Slalom… I honestly can’t tell you how many more courses of any type there are between there and any credits though because we’re now as far as I’ve ever got, beginner or champion or whatever! Let’s stick with a regular, beginner course for now though, and see how it all feels to play. I don’t think the “surfer” you pick makes any difference whatsoever to gameplay – it’s European, American or Japanese, each with different coloured outfits and boards, so we’ll just go default European (as that’s also what I used to be), watch him “surf” off to the start gate and leave the other two looking dejected! And now we’ve got that start gate wobble in all it’s glory, and I reckon it’s an impressive sight, with realistic scaffolding holding it all together, and colourful banners, and officials and media people gathered around the little cage you’re about to get let loose from. These start gates get subtly mixed-up between races too, so one might have a fence behind it and vertical banners either side, while another might have a 4×4 truck or snow-ski thing and a set of wooden ramps either side with the banners on them. Small things but this is going on everywhere, from cable cars going past in some levels to different bits of greenery poking through the snow, and it all combines to really give the illusion of both life and variety, which can be a challenge when everywhere is white! 

Our immediate challenge is getting out of the gate though, where you’re being encouraged to pump that button to wind yourself up and give yourself a boost, which can also happen along certain straights if you’ve found yourself going slow after a crash or a just a series of corners. In fact, pumping the button whenever you have the chance sort of becomes the default, especially later on when the tracks become a continuous series of minor curves and bends, although I’m not sure it actually does anything at all when it’s not telling you to do so – certainly makes you feel better though, like you’re giving it your all! And in reality there’s not a huge amount for you to do otherwise! When you approach a decent turn, you’ll get an arrow on the screen telling you which way it goes, and also indicates how sharp or deep it’s going to be, or, indeed, it might be a quick series of turns, like a chicane, which will also be indicated… By the way, best feeling in the game there, when you’ve really nailed one of those! Nailing any turn is all about timing though – give it half a second or so after the arrow appears and the turn itself is upon you, so you want to whack left or right and hold it just long enough to come out going straight and in the middle of the track. And that’s pretty much the entire game!

Let go too soon or hold it too long and you’re likely to end up in a fence on one side or the other, or missing a ramp and missing out on some extra speed, or simply losing time by going into deeper snow along the sides, which is where you’ll also find those slalom flags in those races. These will throw up a “fault” message when you hit them but apart from also slowing you down – and often repeatedly when you’ve gone out of whack after hitting the first – I don’t think you’re being penalised in any other way. Conversely, some tracks will contain one or two of those tricks we talked about earlier, where you’ll go through a tunnel or over a ramp or around a spectacular loop-the-loop, and getting yourself lined-up and safely through them in one piece will net you a one-and-a-half second time bonus, and while that doesn’t sound like much, you completing the race is probably relying on it, even after an otherwise perfect run once you’re a few races in! Cross the finish line within the time limit and you’ll qualify for the next race, as well as receive a score, which I guess is based on time but there may be some other nuance to it as well, like how well you’ve followed the racing line, because it does throw up some weird but very precise big numbers!

High score chasing is going to take you a while though – in either difficulty mode, the immediate fun is going to be found in simply getting to the next course and the next and so on for a long time, and as said, we’re probably looking at twenty in each mode minimum, although I can’t verify that, either myself or elsewhere because this game doesn’t seem to get that much love – all about World Rally and its sequel! Worth saying that this game is even more black and white than either of them too because there’s skill involved in learning to drift in those but there’s none of that here; you’re just sticking the edge of your board into the snow to varying degrees, and that’s absolutely fine (and way better than a colder reskin of an old driving game could have been)! Pump the button and press left and right feels great in action, playing out almost like a rhythm-action game with an emphasis on the latter, and while it’s not quite SSX, there is a real physicality between the board and the snow when you turn, and a nice friction between them in general. Coming back to longevity though, there’s little hidden depth to be found here – it’s literally a left and right timed reaction to an on-screen prompt, but to me at least, that’s longevity enough – straightforward, addictive, pure arcade enjoyment!

And the way it’s all presented does it absolutely no harm either. It’s so dynamic and so vibrant, and as alluded to earlier, there’s so much life everywhere, and none more so than in your snowboarder and their non-stop and totally realistic animation, from maintaining their balance with their arms as they constantly move left and right to manage their speed, to their slapstick, head-over-heels tumbles, totally encumbered by the six-foot of wood connecting their feet as they fall! And it’s all matched by a shadow realistically following the action too, which moves along at real pace and super-smoothly on the diagonal, just like it would if you were hurling yourself down a real mountain! When you bring in the other people hanging around the track though, while there is plenty of motion there too, it’s all a bit stunted in comparison – in fact, it reminded me a lot of NBA Jam in this respect, where the players move fluidly but in real contrast to the almost binary movements of the crowds looking on from the sidelines. Like I said before though, they’ve got so much about them to make up for it, and other “furniture” like trees and shrubbery, and those plastic mesh fences you get down ski slopes, and the ski lifts and fancy flags, and even the textures and light and shadows flowing across the snow itself, load-up every single course with tons and tons of interest as it all flies by. You can almost feel the chill!

And while I’ve maybe played down how much long-term interest there is in the gameplay itself, put it together with all these wild sights and sounds, and I’ve not been able to put this game down for years now, especially since that Evercade version came along and I can play it wherever I want! Actually, coming back to score, I think the only thing that would extend that interest for me is to almost ditch that and replace it with a record of best course times instead – I’ve been playing just three Virtua Racing tracks almost daily for years too, and getting any time into that top twenty-five for each each one will always be such a thrill, and the only one I need to keep me coming back! As just said though, doing that isn’t much of a struggle without ! I absolutely love this game just how it is, learning (and re-learning) my way though the tracks and their nuances, consistently reaching the ones that demand constant feathering of controls and brushing against flags for split-seconds of extra time gained against that increasingly cruel clock, but mostly just enjoying an exhilarating ride that demands concentration but little brain-power, and as such is just an easy-going good time with a bit of an edge and the slightest hint of danger about it. A bit like ZZ Top from earlier! But not so much like SSX, and its role as the snowboarder I’ll never be; instead, just like its car rallying stablemates, it’s far more akin to the something like Space Invaders or Arkanoid, where it’s all about getting into a zone (albeit an exquisitely themed one!) without any fuss… Just a lovely escape into left, right and the odd button press! And after all that, it turns out I had something to say about Snowboard Championship after all!

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