20%PlayStation

In the 1990s, the world was extreme. Violence in the media became more commonplace, punk and metal-adjacent music truly entered the mainstream, and it seemed like everything was in a competition to be as shocking and in-your-face as possible. One of the most memorable heralds of this societal shift was the indominable rise of extreme sports. Skateboarding and snowboarding had never been more popular with American youth, even leading to the formation of the X Games in 1995. Suffice it to say, this extreme culture would be represented in video games as well. It's easy enough to see just by looking back at 90s video game advertisements and their whacky, over-the-top commercials and magazine spots. And when you combine this extreme era with video games fully entering the 3D space, a perfect storm was bound to form, and out of it was born the extreme sports video game. And while many point to a certain skateboarding game as the de facto mainstream birth of the genre, it was truly alive and well for years by the time many performed their first virtual drop-in. And for most on the early-era PS1, it was alive through the snowboarding series Cool Boarders.

Cool Boarders isn't a series that gets a lot of discussion these days, but while it may be foreign to many, it was definitely a strong series in its time. It had a pair of "Greatest Hits" titles in its ranks, and of the two of them, it was Cool Boarders 3, which sold the most. As a game that sold nearly 1.5 million units, you'd think it would be a more popular topic in retro gaming discussion, at least for its nostalgia value. A brief play session reveals pretty clearly why this isn't the case.

Cool Boarders 3 was the first in the series to be developed by 3rd party developer Idol Minds, and if they had one modus operandi, it was most likely to make the game bigger. More events, more courses, more characters, more snowboards. If there was a quantifiable entity in Cool Boarders 1 or 2, it was likely increased—by an order of magnitude—in Cool Boarders 3. It's a nice feature, especially as earlier titles in the series were relatively limited. But these additions aren't always for the best; while elements like Big Air and Slalom represent themselves pretty well and are generally welcome additions, events like Half Pipe make it obvious that this game wasn't designed with them in mind. With each of these events comes unique courses, but it's pretty baffling why none of them are multipurpose. (You can't, for example, race on a slopestyle course or vice versa.) And while the amount of unlockable characters and boards is appreciated, they generally don't do much to transform the game's feel or to make the controls any better.

It's almost inevitable that these early-era sports games, especially those pre-DualShock, that controls will be at least a minor issue. Cool Boarders 3 is, sadly, no exception. Perhaps it's just because later games have standardized controls somewhat, but the movements and controls of CB3 are not intuitive by any means, and even after you learn them, you'll likely take a fair degree of time getting used to them, and it's more time than the game probably deserves. Whether you land a trick or crash can seem utterly random, and working your way through the later tournaments can often feel like an exercise in futility. The game does, thankfully, allow players to save their progress after each event, and in a frustrating game such as this, it's doubly helpful. But the gameplay is too generic, the contests too tedious, and the controls too poor to incentivize players to actually reach these later game challenges. It's the type of game that really only seems like it has value in the multiplayer environment, and it's likely that's how it's remembered by the few who do remember it.

Cool Boarders 3 was, by all accounts, a successful title. It represented its era well, after all. But that's really all it does. It's not special in any significant way, and there's no real reason to go back to this title if you don't have some pre-instilled nostalgia for it. In truth, there's not much reason to go back to it at all, nostalgia factor notwithstanding. Many titles that were outsold by it have gone on to become cult classics, highly regarded in their genre and highly sought-after. If those titles are to be called sleeper hits, then Cool Boarders 3 represents the opposite. Immediately popular, and almost just as immediately obsolete.

60%No Platform Specified

I'll be blunt. Snowboarding games have never really gotten me fired up, so it takes a really good one to make me sit up and take notice. Unfortunately, the latest Cool Boarders did anything but.

While the game certainly has things dialed in on the technical front, it did absolutely nothing for me gameplay-wise. Granted, there are plenty of courses and boarders compared to the past titles, but it's stale as a year-old loaf of banana bread in execution.

In a nutshell: there's absolutely nothing here you haven't seen before. Unless you absolutely, positively must have the newest snowboarding game around, I'd recommend passing.