Before we kick things off, we want to tell you a true story. When Shaun White Snowboarding originally got sent to us, on a disc labeled ’REVIEW CODE’ in big letters, we soon got the whole office hanging around the TV – absolutely mesmerized. Were the assembled onlookers intrigued by the amazing open world of Shaun White’s? Yeah, kind of, a few of the real-life snowboarders commented on how cool it was to be able to carve down a whole mountain how they wanted.
But there was something else that commanded their rapt attention that day. Was it the crisp beauty of a wintery wonderland running on the much praised Assassin’s Creed engine? Not as such, while hitting the ski slopes as Altair’s unofficial bastard, pot smoking ancestor is very pleasing to the eye, it did not overly impress the rabble watching the TV.
What did keep the non-gamers glued to the idiot box was the super-human way we could quickly half-flip our boarder onto his head, grind along the ground on our eyebrows, accelerate to a ludicrous speed, launch off a kicker, and land an epic grab trick. Surely this bug was an isolated incident? No – it really, really wasn’t. The controller went around to all of the casual gaming office people that day, and head grinding quickly became the coolest way to score an insane amount of points. Elissa from advertising even managed to head grind her way into two of the hardest achievements – purely by using her melon to pull off the king of all melons.
Understandably we were a little bemused that such a massive bug could make it into finished code and, so we decided to cut Shaun some slack and wait until some shrink-wrapped retail code arrived until we tendered our final opinion.
Sure enough, when the boxed copy arrived the head grind antics were all but gone. Only in extremely rare cases could we pull the same bug off (and not with the same spectacular ’four second speed boost’ results). Instead we were given a handful of new bugs; now some grinds snagged us and caused, what Borat Sagdiyev could only describe as ‘some very funny rrretardation’, until our avatar eventually ate shit and we were unhooked.
