It's been a while since Nintendo's last foray into its 1080 Snowboarding franchise, and in fact Australian gamers have had to wait even longer than the rest of the world to get their hands on Nintendo's latest take - while US and even UK gamers were playing 1080 Avalanche quite some time ago, we've had to undergo a wait for no readily apparent reason. If we were cynical types, we'd say that someone at Nintendo looked at last year's superlative SSX 3 and thought it might do better to wait out that title's sales before attempting to take it on. Put head to head, 1080 Avalanche is clearly the lesser title - it's certainly fun for a while, and it's certainly very, very fast, but that's about all it has going for it, as it's a thrill ride that's all too quickly ended.
The basic action in 1080 Avalanche revolves around very short sprint races; while there's the inevitable foray into stunt performances, they're really an adjunct to simply getting down the hill as fast as humanly possible. In a title obsessed with pure speed, though, it's interesting to note that tricking doesn't reward you with extra speed - as it does in EA's SSX series - but instead with the ability to knock down opposing riders. The main career mode is broken up into three difficulty levels, but thanks to some extremely rubber AI, unless you do extremely poorly it won't take you very long to get through everything 1080 Avalanche has to offer you.
That's primarily because the majority of courses run at under three minutes, making the fast races go by even more quickly. There's an attempt to force some longevity with a limited lives setup, and for that matter a not terribly exciting time trial and stunt mode. If you're a fan of Time Trials, you'll no doubt find it odd that the Time Trials main goal isn't just racking up the best times - you're also expected to pick up coins used to unlock better goodies for the main game.
1080 Avalanche does support multi-player play via either split screen - where things get small and framerates suffer - or via LAN play if you've contacted Nintendo, purchased the network adaptor, found three other gamecubes, 3 other copies of 1080 Avalanche and enough chips and drinks to keep you all happy. Somehow, we doubt too many gamers will bother - and having only a single copy to play with, we couldn't really test it out at all.
1080 Avalanche attempts to retain some credibility with a smattering of alternative musical acts supplying the soundtrack, although in this effort it's utterly dwarfed in this area by the ton of tracks on offer in Microsoft's otherwise ordinary Amped 2. Visually 1080 Avalanche only really suffers in one area, and strangely enough for a game built around speed, that's in the fact that it often slows down when there's a lot of onscreen action.
Gamecube gamers have to put up with a games library that's smaller than that of competing consoles, and as such 1080 Avalanche might seem like a worthy purchase simply due to its nature as a first-party Nintendo title. We'd certainly suggest rental beforehand, and suspect that many gamers might just see everything the title has to offer in that initial rental period.
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