Disney Sports Snowboarding [GBA]

After releasing a whopping four different games in the Disney Sports line last year (Soccer, Skateboarding, Basketball, and Football), Konami's ready for 2003 with another set of Game Boy Advance games featuring the Mickey crew. The first Disney Sports game released for the season is the timely Disney Sports Snowboarding, filling a genre that hasn't had too much success on the GBA system. Konami's game isn't that bad, but its choice in graphic engines, while looking great on the LCD screen, obviously limits its design.

Features

• Five stages
• 30 boards to unlock
• Six snowboarders
• Link cable support for two players
• Connectivity with GameCube for data transfer
• Cartridge save (one slot)
• Only for Game Boy Advance

In Disney Sports Snowboarding, the challenge, just like in every snowboarding game made to date, is to make your way down the snow courses as fast as possible. Players can pull off tricks by gaining enough speed and leaping into the air, with a system that's actually quite easy and forgiving...obviously aimed at the younger crowd. There are a few gameplay modes in this snowboarding title, but most involve skiing down a hill with a second opponent, racing that other snowboarder to the finish line. Some modes are simply races, while others encourage pulling off as many tricks as possible for a high score. There are six different characters to choose from in this Disney game, each with his or her own snowboarding attributes; the attributes can be increased by collecting snowboards throughout the different races.

The game utilizes a graphics trick that gives off the illusion of a 3D course. Basically, the development team pre-rendered several course segments as full-motion video, stringing them together as one long, seamless course. It's a technique that was used on the Game Boy Color quite a few times, and it has the same result on the Game Boy Advance. The character sprites interact with the FMV as if it was a solid object, and this technique is pulled off pretty successfully in Disney Sports Snowboarding...until you realize that all the courses look almost exactly the same. The only other problem is that the character sprites -- while reacting to slopes and objects put forth in the FMV -- look like they're floating as they slide down the course, since their boards can't really "etch" a path into the snow behind them.

And because there's not a whole lot of variety in the courses, there just isn't a whole lot to do, other than the standard gain speed, get air, do a trick, land, and repeat. The development team attempts to add a little to the design by its "Trick Card" collection, an element where players can grab collectables by pulling off tricks at specific points on the track. These cards can be viewed outside of the race. And it is a challenge grabbing all of the cards at each of the points on all of the tracks...but it'll just take a bit of tolerance to withstand the redundant looking slopes.

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