By 1997, the PlayStation was really into its stride, bringing console gaming to a wider British audience than ever before, at the same time as leading the takeover of polygonal 3D. Like at the start of the ‘90s, what games could offer was in flux again. It was bad news for many established developers (in the UK in particular), but a great time for newer ones who got it right. And fresh concepts were able to not only succeed but to set a lot of the terms for popular gaming some way into the future. Cool Boarders, by Japan’s otherwise unsuccessful UEP Systems, is a case in point, working mostly as a successful proof of concept.
They started off with a relatively fresh sport in snowboarding, whose move towards the mainstream was indicated the following year by its first appearance in the Winter Olympics, also in Japan. That provides the rush of heading down a snowy mountain very fast on a small board, and Cool Boarders is dedicated to that experience and little else. You must get from top to bottom as fast as possible, avoiding going off a cliff or hitting walls or rocks too hard. UEP manage to get a feeling of speed and of precarity, of having control while not being fully in control. The tug of gravity gives it a different feeling to even the more frictionless driving games, and carves a space of its own. Trying to get round a sharp bend without slowing down so much as to slide back and fall off the edge is a challenge with straightforward aims but a satisfying level of complexity.
Cool Boarders has some gestures to more than going down the mountain fast. It has three courses to select from, ranging from tricky to cruel. You can also choose between a handful of boards with different properties, as well as a handful of cosmetically different riders. It keeps score of not just your time but of the jumps and tricks it lets you do, albeit within the very limited range of holding one end of the board or the other. That doesn’t amount to anything more than you would quickly flick through as a precursor to your go at an arcade machine, though. There is no multiplayer option. There are no opponents to race against. There is just a time trial, with a ‘ghost’ replay of your previous best time visible. My initial reaction to discovering the tight borders of the Cool Boarders experience was very much “…is this it?”
Putting the focus utterly on the challenge, you versus the mountain, has its positives as well. There are very few distractions, and with nothing else to do but keep throwing yourself down the slope it’s easier to appreciate the strength of its handling. It’s also easier to get hooked into working out the incremental ways of going faster. I soon found myself in a cycle of repeated attempts, restarting at each major mistake, in a way that most games don’t manage. There is a reason, though, that racing time trials against ghosts is usually a way of practicing or taking a quick break from the real deal of a racing game. Its limits do begin to chafe.
Cool Boarders makes a strong case that snowboarding games are a great idea. It’s just less convincing on whether this particular one is a great snowboarding game. Its success made its own obsolescence inevitable. For now, though, it was enough.
