Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip on the Nintendo Wii is one of the first few major titles to take advantage of the Wii Balance board.  Don’t worry if you do not own one, the Wii remotes work just fine with the game.  In this review, we check out the ins and outs of the first snowboarding game built around the Wii balance board by Ubisoft

Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip is not the same type of game as Shaun White Snowboarding on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, it is not an open world where you and friends spend a day hanging out on the slopes.  The Wii version of the game is more a straight career path game, where each mountain and tricks get progressively harder with each level.  As the title implies you and a bunch of friends are on a road trip around the world visiting various mountains where each “snowboard trail” has a different goal you must beat.  Whether it is as simple as slaloming down the hill as fast as you can or racking up a set number of points in the time allotted.

Let’s get down to the Wii balance board first, is it like snowboarding?  Being a snowboarder myself, it is not exactly but it is darn close to it.  It feels more like you are skateboarding than snowboarding.  I even accidentally leaned back and lifted up my toes on the Wii balance board and nearly fell off backwards (don’t do that!) because that is how you carve on a real snowboard.  If a videogame can make a real snowboarder attempt to carve like they do in real life, it must be doing something correct.  The safer way to play the game is to leave both feet planted on the Wii balance board and to ensure to shift pressure from side to another, or to do tricks, from one foot to another.  Turning in the air is even easier with just a simple body twist, your snowboarder will turn.  It is quite simple.  You only have to press the A and/or B buttons on the Wii remote to pull off some tricks.  Using the Wii remote is a little harder as you need to keep your “balance” by tilting the remote, it is much easier to shift weight on the more sensitive Wii Balance board than the remote.

The game truly tries to get you into the “road trip” mood with text pages and e-mails from fellow competitor’s trash talking you or even voice messages from Shaun White himself.  You’ll even get the occasional strange spam which has nothing to do with the game.  You can’t reply any of these e-mails (sorry these people aren’t really online speaking to you to you on your Wii) but it adds an extra dimension to the game and is not too annoying.

Dare goals are how you advance to other countries and mountains, the dare will involve such crazy things such as picking up a set number trash cans, beat the dare and boom you got a ticket to your next mountain.

The game can be played up to 4 players in almost all the events, however the Shaun White Snowboarding only supports one Wii balance board at a time.  I guess Ubisoft figured no one would buy 4 copies of Wii Fit…or would they?  Co-op is totally separate, so if you have a single player game, your friend can’t just join you for one snowboarding session.

Graphics in the game are no where near the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 versions of the game, and with no online multiplayer either.  However, the graphics are sharp and colourful, it gets the job done and looks pretty good for a Wii game.  The sound track isn’t half bad with a few licensed tracks from some alternative bands.

Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip for the Wii is truly a pick up and play, for the novice gamer to the hard core snowboarder who is itching to snowboard on that Wii balance board.  Being developed at Ubisoft Montreal, I can relate to the snowboarders (I am one myself) who took great pride in creating the game, and it shows!

Gameplay

Graphics

Sound

Overall