Review
Played on: DuckStation (PlayStation emulator)
Released: 1999
Initially I wanted to expand on playthroughs of Electronic Arts Big titles from the early 2000s. Reminiscing titles like SSX Tricky, SSX 3 and Shox; I realise I've very much enjoyed this era of heavily stylised sports titles from EA.
They look good with their own stylized, colourful, visual appearance including billboards and fireworks. They offer an upbeat expansive soundtrack of contemporary music of their era and have a strong focus on unique gameplay elements like tricks and stunts. All while at the same time, sharing a commonality in their design and visual aesthetic.
The PS2 release, Sled Storm from 2002 was on my radar. Researching, I found out it's a sequel to a PS1 title, so before jumping in I decided to give the first one a spin. Simply to see what it was about and give me something to compare the sequel with. However, I was not expecting to find a solid snowmobile racer like this.
Let's take a closer and snowy look!
I realise this is a late PS1 release, 1999 to be precise, but I'm surprised how well they've combined a responsive and controllable experience with visuals that do a solid job of depicting believable nature scenery to make it a solid winter sport experience on the hardware.
Apart from the obvious choices in a racer, quick race and time trails, the main campaign mode is more comprehensive than I was expecting. You can choose between Open Mountain and Super snocross. Open Mountain is a traditional championship with eight consecutive races.
Relentlessly, you must come in first place to progress, and you have only three tries, failing them all sends you to the start of the championship. There are only four snowmobiles in each race with plenty of room to make passes but mess up on the very last corner and end up having to restart. Throwing you all the way back to the start of the championship feels extremely brutal. I recommend playing on an emulator as it allows you to do a save before each race.
Doing tricks and stunts along the way will earn points, which in turn can be spent to upgrade your snowmobile. Upgrading gives you an edge over the competition, offering lots of parts to swap out. Be it better belts, steering handles or even a stronger light for night races. Upgrades are only available for Open Mountain mode and only accessible between races in the championship, but they carry over to the other modes.
In addition, the layout of the championship is confusing; seemingly there's four races and then back the main menu. It doesn't convey that you need to replay the championship. In the second run, weather is foggy and two extra races are added for a total of six. On the third run, it's nighttime and while it offers some cool light strobes from the snowmobiles, your sight ahead is severely limited. Fourth, and last run, features heavy snowfall and another two additional races.
In the Super snocross mode, racetracks are arena based and have a lot of jumps in them, unlike the ordinary racetracks through natural environments, they're much shorter and condensed as a sort of stadium event. They're less tricky to win and offer many changes to do tricks as you race. They allow you to rack up a lot of points with all the jumps for upgrades.
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At first, I was a little confused by the trick system, found on the R2 & L2 buttons, pressing them mid-air seemed to trigger a glimpse of a numerical counter. After a few tries, I understood that this counts the points while airborne and performing tricks. These tricks aren't simply pressing R2 or L2 either, you need to. combine them with other buttons and directions on the d-pad.
Typical for its time, the animation of these tricks are rather subdued and stiff, making it tricky as to which one you performed or if your character is doing anything at all. In combination with this numeric counter popping up, it another unintuitive design which I realise modern titles are better at conveying.
Outside the trick system, extra points can be racked up by hitting signs, small trees, bunnies, yes, bunnies and even snowmen. With a fair number of routes to choose from while racing a lap, there's always a one suited for doing more tricks and knocking stuff over. Take the safe and longer route or a shorter off-road one for jumps but with more dangers. Each racetrack has an impressive handful of shortcuts, alternative routes and wide areas for a title of this era.
There are two camera angles, but with such bumpy racetrack layouts full of jumps it's disorientating to use the bumper cam and so the exterior view if far preferable. It allows you a better overview of your surroundings, avoiding bumping into walls and other snowmobiles and keeping an eye on your driver doing tricks.
There's a distinct Alaska-style, could've been here in Norway to be honest, to the environments which results in a limited visual variation to the surroundings. It's about pine forests, mountains, wooden cabins, frozen lakes and snowy hills, with a ship and factories thrown in for good measure.
That said, it depicts this kind of environment well in its 32-bit low polygon effort and there's some neat weather effects thrown into the mix with rain and snow, as well as night races. Although the latter is brutally limited sight and results in taking massive chances, hoping to see where the road leads.
I like how the visual ambition has been focused in on challenging terrain and technique rather than long roads with distant views the hardware can't handle. Packing close detail in, hiding the view distance with tight turns, high terrain and steep banks is a smart move and suits the gameplay well. As a result, it depicts a tight environment view with a lot of elevation changes.
There's a limit to how convincing you can do snow in this era, but Sled Storm packs in enough effects and geometry to at least make it convincing. We know that the generation that preceded it would give snow-based titles the extra hardware to properly make snow deform and look soft, but this is solid effort.
Impressively for the PS1, in comparison with how frequent the N64 supported it, there's a four player splitscreen! Not sure how that holds up in terms of performance on the original hardware, but back then we didn't care so much. Running it on a DuckStation emulator will brute force the framerate to run stable at least.
I'm not sure there are many alternatives on PS1 to this, for winter sports you have the Cool Boarders series and for motorbikes Moto Racer 1 & 2 are solid, Jet Moto might be considered in the ballpark too but that's a futuristic racer.
With lots of hardware experience under the belt, Sled Storm ends up as a technically sound title for an ageing console in 1999; the result shows EA were diverse and impressive with variation in this era.
My gripe here, as with many older titles, is just the relentless difficulty curve. The way you can screw up at the very last part, only to see one single competitor pass you and anything below first place is an automatic failure. There should have been a points system to the championship. Some erratic snowmobile behaviour off jumps and on ledges doesn't exactly help either. I'd warmly recommend quick saving this in an emulator.
That said, I was surprised to find it this enjoyable and controllable to race! The depiction of nature and snow it well done for such limited hardware. I can recommend Sled Storm as an original and alternative racer to car-based ones on the system. It would've shined even better had the layout been more intuitive and allowing a save between each race.
I'll be back with my view on the EA Big sequel on PS2 at a later point!
