Today is officially Friday the 13th of October, which means it's the perfect day to talk about Resident Evil. This series hardly needs an introduction, with a successful remake and a DLC released the same year. For the uninitiated, Resident Evil is a long-running survivor horror franchise developed by Capcom, centered around a viral outbreak that has turned the residents of Raccoon City into zombies. In 1998, Resident Evil 2 was released, featuring two new protagonists, Leon S Kennedy and Clair Redfield. It was greatly received and considered by some to be the best of the original PlayStation trilogy, with its legacy leading to its eventful remake in 2019.
A year before, in 1997, Japanese arcade developer, Cave, released a game on the Sega Saturn titled Steep Slope Sliders. In some ways, this could be seen as Sega's "answer" to Cool Boarders 2, a PlayStation-exclusive snowboarding game that was creating a buzz among fans of the extreme sport. Unfortunately, despite being well received, the Sega Saturn's popularity decline meant that fewer people experienced Steep Slope Sliders than they would on a different console. In 1998, an arcade version was released, using a simple two-button and joystick layout. This version would be published by Capcom, who would also publish the sequel, Trick'n Snowboarder, on the Sony PlayStation a few months later.
Perhaps to promote the game, Capcom allowed Cave to reuse assets from Resident Evil 2 to include Leon, Claire, and a zombie cop. By entering simple cheat codes, in an area where cool content was accessible by a simple "up, up, down, down," the player can access these characters from the beginning of the game. While it may seem random to include Resident Evil 2, I could think of several reasons. Aside from the assets being available from a popular 3D game in Capcom's catalog, the series composer at the time also worked on the music for Trick'n Snowboarder.
Masami Ueda was the original composer of the original Resident Evil trilogy and Akari Kaida was a fellow composer who also worked on several Capcom titles. Both would work on the musical score and would work together in the future on the Okami soundtrack. That said, the music here is atypical of what I'm used to hearing from both composers. It has that heavy sample bass-thumping hip-hop late '90s groove that I hear in most games from this era. What I found most interesting was that the samples used included profanity yet the game itself received an E for Everyone rating.
Most people's reaction to this game is the utter shock that Cave, a developer known for their legacy in bullet hell arcade shooters, created a game in a genre that's the complete opposite. As was the case even back then, multiple staff members worked on different titles. Director Yasuyuki Hirota had no involvement with Cave's shoot-em-up titles. Hirota also directed Steep Slope Sliders and would go on to direct his third and final game, Yanya Caballista: City Skater, also developed by Cave and something of a spiritual successor to Trick'n SNowboader.
Keeping the arcade roots in mind, I never played this game growing up so this was the first time I ever experienced this. At first, the way the boarders handled felt awkward as it was a weird mix of "simlike" and arcade. The Cool Boarders series impressed me because of how smooth and magnetized the riders felt while barrelling down a mountain past sixty miles per hour. In Trick'n Snowboarder, the shoulder buttons are used to carve into turns, with simple layouts meant to line the player up for jumps. Here, racing isn't the goal, but as the title suggests, tricking and winning your boss over through the Extreme Tour.
Tricking in Trick'n Snowboarder is unlike any Snowboarding game I've played and in many ways it predates some Ubisoft titles like Steep and Riders Republic. In most games, like SSX, you pre-wind your jump and let go of the jump button at the apex of the ramp for maximum height. In this game, the jump is a button. You don't hold to pre-wind, you just press the button at the height of the ramp to gain a boost. Flips and grab tricks have their buttons and they are combined with directional inputs to change direction. Each character has four grabs tied to each cardinal direction and they can be chained by pressing one button after another. Spins can be incorporated by pressing the shoulder buttons along with the flip button.
So to do a 540-degree backflip, the player would have to press Square to jump, then press Down + Circle to initiate a flip while pressing R1 or L1 to turn. It wants to be Tony Hawk's Pro Skater but even Downhill Jam handled this mechanic better a decade later. In Trick'n Snowboarder, player control and lining up for air opportunities are the main goals of the game here in the form of filming shots for a professional crew.
The main mode is Scenario mode, in which the player chooses one of four present characters and competes among several courses. Switzerland, U.S.A., Russia, Japan, and the back countries of Alaska are some of the different locations the player will travel to. Each course consists of four "trick spots" in which players must trick while the camera is rolling. If the player fails the trick or doesn't make it to the spot in time, then it will count as a "No Good." Getting two or more "No Goods" will fail the run and the higher the score total, the better you impress your boss. This may also influence who will challenge you as rivals will approach you depending on how well or how badly you're performing. This is also how you unlock other characters through normal means.
I liked this concept. Rather than give the players a simple goal like "get X number of points" or "race against three other boarders to the finish," each stage plays out like a recording session. There are comms in your ear at all times, yelling when the next camera point is approaching, and the cameraman's inability to "get a clear shot." It makes you feel as if you're all working together to reach the goal. Dare I say it helped give the game its charm, combined with its already groovy soundtrack. Unfortunately, the game is far too short to enjoy most of this and some of the courses were a hit or miss.
Beating the main Scenario mode will unlock two new courses, accessible by highlighting the Snowboard Park and One Jump levels while holding the L1 button. This will access the Golf course and the Antarctica course respectively. Both courses are okay, I mean, you shred down a golf course with a hole in the end that you can land your character in if you're precise enough. The Antarctica mega jump has you skydiving into a pile of 2D penguin sprites so that's also cool.
Honestly, the main draw of Trick'n Snowboarder is the Resident Evil 2 characters and even they perform the same as the rest of the cast. Sure they have their unique voices and boards, but that's it. The game itself is short but in the time I spent with it, I had more fun than I expected coming into this. It plays less like a snowboarding game and more like an arcade game that wants to be a snowboarding game.
Trick'n Snowbarder is a middle-of-the-road arcade title that has its shining moments, but once players get what they played the game for and have fun, there's little incentive to keep playing outside of goofing off with the zombie character. Feel free to check this one out if you want to see your favorite STARS members rocket off of ramps and into the stars.