Shaun White Snowboarding: World Stage
Going down hill?
Elsewhere, the competition structure has been jiggled around a bit - you move from one location to the next a lot more, and you also get to play as Shaun White himself a little bit earlier on in proceedings - and there are new locations, including spots in the UK and France.
The stylised globe-trotting backgrounds are certainly eye-catching - I have no idea which manner of peyote buttons the art team was whacked out on when they visited Paris, but the Eiffel Tower is not made of purple candy, and it isn't a million feet tall, either. But the slope designs seem a little uninspired and interchangeable this time around, and most are too anonymous to bring any real sense of escalating excitement to the game's relentless flow of trick challenges and races.
A lot of the old stuff still works, of course. Entering each event after choosing a cameraman, each of whom comes with their own perk, continues to add a gentle strategic element to the game, while the multiplayer stuff - still offline except for leaderboards - remains a rowdy treat, offering freeplay or cup runs, supporting split-screen and hot-seat options.
Equally, if you're between the ages of six and eight, a lot of the game's design decisions suddenly make a lot more sense. There's a trick system based on shaking the controller like you're in the process of being electrocuted, and the relentlessly upbeat manner in which deems your performance "Not Bad!", for instance, even when you place eighth in an eight-man event, having hit every tree, missed every power-up, and ended each jump in a painful tangle of broken limbs.
But even then, cannier tweens might leave with the sense that the game seems slightly rushed. Events will often dump you into a track that's patently not suited for it - a big air challenge filled with rails to grind, a trick run with lots of empty straights - and the unlockable outfits and boards can seem like a bit of an afterthought.
World Stage is alright, so if it's an alright game you're after, this is the one you've been looking for. Bombing downhill with such a chirpy crew in tow was always going to provide a certain amount of fun, and there's still the sense that this is a series that has adapted itself a lot more intelligently to the Wii than most games have.
Despite that, at just two games in, Shaun White's ideas are starting to look a little thin on the ground. You'll still likely enjoy playing World Stage for the four or five hours it will take to see a fair amount of what's on offer, but when it's all over, it may be harder to argue that the game itself is particularly special.