Game:

Cool Boarders Pocket (2000)

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Eh. Cool Boarders Pocket is an "okay" though incredibly basic snowboarding video game that's more akin to a Slalom / Obstacle Course game than a real snowboarding game, developed by UEP Systems and published by SNK in 2000. It is multi-region, which means the game will display English text if played in an English NGPC, though it doesn't really matter at all as the game has little text in which to speak of. It is one of the lesser-known titles within the "Cool Boarders" series.

The game has two characters (Ken and Jun) and two main modes (Freeride and Survival) and boasts an impressive number of courses to shred, with several dozen levels. The game achieves this with a mediocre presentation, decent soundtrack, and a limited array of obstacles and course designs, so levels will soon begin to all look the same and become very repetitive. The gameplay is botched, which is where the vast majority of the game's criticism comes from, and it's the one thing that makes this game go from decent to something you'd only recommend to diehard NGPC enthusiasts.

For starters, the controls are not very good; it takes many plays to get used to them in any real fashion as there are no controls for breaking, jumps do not come out as they should, turning is difficult and you have to be quite familiar with the game's architecture before you're used to them, some levels have huge "leap of faith" chasms (where the odds of success are like five percent), and even the easiest courses have so many obstacles that you're unlikely to survive until the level is committed to memory. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have stamina (the timer is fine, but you can die from four or five collisions) and if pits weren't so damn awful. Why pits? Because they put you back on a seemingly random location on the track (before or after the pit in question) and give you no time to think or adjust your position, which usually leads to you falling in them again and again. If they gave you a two or even one second grace period, it would be a lot more tolerable.

Your boarder has two kinds of jumps (a small jump which usually must be timed perfectly to use and a spinning jump that requires a little more charging of the jump button), the ability to crouch and build speed (useful for clearing larger gaps and improving course time), and the nearly useless ability to recover health when you're moving at high speeds (shown with a yellow bar under your health; you get one health bracket back each time it fills up). There are no differences that I can discern between the characters, so it's basically to appeal to the sex factor. The main game is challenging enough, but if you're really feeling brave and have brushed up your skills, you can tackle the survival mode, which is a combination of every course design in the game thrown at you in a random order. This is a video showing some of the game in action. Enjoy.