Pros: Hasn't been proven to cause blindness or sterility
Cons: It has no redeeming features whatsoever
The bottom line: Part 1 of 4 for the weekend
When I thought up the idea for this weekend-long exercise, I knew that I had to start with something small... you know, to build up my tolerance of utter garbage. Well, nothing is as small in video games as a Game Boy, so I knew that I should go for the portable first. And what better purveyor of garbage than THQ?

With my supply of bad THQ games that I haven't reviewed slowly dwindling, I cast about until I found this little stinker. Why, I had opened it up and played it before, but cast it aside without another thought until recently. Why would I have just tossed it away so quickly? I put it back into my Game Boy and quickly had a flashback. Of utter despair.

So, you understand the basic concept. You are to travel down a mountain, on only one small piece of board, and try not to kill yourself. But wait, this is video gaming, and that wouldn't be fun. No, you've got to avoid killing yourself all while doing things to insure your future in traction, commonly called "tricks." Of course, because you know you aren't good unless you can show off.

So you go to leap right into the game experience. But first, the game wants you to pick your options. In this, the game proves to be the most disappointing creation ever. You get to select a character from a wide range of... two. Only two people are crazy enough to take part in this game, and even they are fictional creations of the programmers. While they do have different capabilities, it is so marginal to not be really worth discussing.

Even more silly is that you continue to choose a snowboard, with different designs. First, are you really paying attention to what design is on your board while you're coasting down the mountain? Second, the different boards don't do anything different in the game. It's the amazing memory-eating, useless option. Well, at least they didn't make the entire game a waste of time and energy, right?

Never speak too soon. You can quickly jump into either practice mode or the competition mode of the game. Practice mode apparently means practice wasting your time, and competition means competing to waste as much time as possible. You run down a mountain, and are given an objective for each part. Sometimes, you are out simply to do tricks for points. Other times, you slalom and make points by doing that correctly. But overall, you go through pain.

Now, the horizontal plane works just nicely. Barring an epileptic seizure on the part of your body to stop you from playing the game, you'll find that hitting each gate on the slalom portions is easy. This makes up for the fact that it is damn near impossible to do any tricks. The button presses are so slow to register, by the time that you are about to perform your trick, you're already landed. And while I admit, it was funny the first couple of times to land head first into the snow, it really lost its appeal quickly. I imagine real snowboarders would say the same thing.

Graphically, the game wants your eyes to understand the undeniable pain the mental processes are experiencing. The graphics are garish and undetailed. You essentially have a thick stick figure that clashes with the pseudo-cerulean above and the off-white below. I know that these programmers don't often see what real life is like, but they can at least get someone to bring them pictures. Or they can download them when they aren't busy playing Quake with the IT department.

Of course, this wouldn't be the total package if your ears weren't tortured as well. This game combines the horrible speakers of a Game Boy with the program wizardry of someone who just learned BASIC and the musical tastes of MTV. If the government had a recording of this back during the Waco standoff, they would have ended that in five minutes, no fuss. This game music is simply that bad.

This game is one of the worst, literally, that I've ever played. I'm half tempted to say that this would crack my bottom twenty ever. The game has absolutely nothing going for it. You would have just as much fun going through a nine-hour seminar on the history of the tax audit. You could staple angry mice to your buttocks for more enjoyment. Simply put, if you ever find yourself with the urge to play this game, save your time and go discover the joys of autotrepanation instead. You'll kill just as many brain cells, but much faster.