History[ | ]
Closed Beta began July 8, 2008 and Open Beta began August 7, 2008 and is still going on right now.[1]
Story Behind the Game[ | ]
2146 AD – Global warming melted Earth's polar ice caps long ago and winter is a thing of the past. No snow in over a century made snowboarding nothing but a distant memory. Motivated to change these circumstances, humanity began Project Powder.
The desire to return to that sublime snow was all-consuming, but there was nowhere to go. Until now. The Warp Gate, an ingenious interstellar creation, enabled travel to previously inaccessible points in the galaxy. Virgin planets blanketed in pristine powder beckon as a new generation of riders prepare to embark on the most thrilling snowboarding adventure of their lives.
Gameplay[ | ]
Before racing you will be brought to a tutorial that teaches you the game basics, controls, and techniques. You can access this tutorial again anytime. There are three different modes of gameplay:
-Race: First to the finish wins. Do tricks to gain boost and use boost to speed up.
-Coin: Whoever collects the most coins wins. Different colors will award different amounts, but brown coins will make you lose coins. There are also special power-ups shaped like rabbit ears that do different things, for example, make your character act like a magnet, or change all silver coins into brown coins and all brown into silver coins.
-Battle: First to the finish wins. This is the same thing as Race mode except that there are different weapons you can get from ice cubes along the race and use against your opponents, like a missile, lightning, a wall to lay behind you, a shield to protect you, etc. Battle mode is somewhat similar to any of the Mario Kart series in the way weapons are picked up and used during the race.[2]
Each mode can be played with teams (red vs blue) or single (everyone for themselves). There are three different zones, each separated by level: 1-5, 1-11, and Free, which has no level limit. In race mode, every map can be played in the Free zone but more complex maps for race mode are off limits in the 1-5 and the 1-11 zone.
Racing to Earn Gold and Level Up[ | ]
In all modes you can boost the amount of experience you get by completing tricks from your trick tree. The amount of gold you get in all races can be boosted by your score, which comes from doing tricks during the race. In Race and Battle modes the amount of experience you gain strictly depends on the place you get in the race and how many people you were racing against. For race, team mode, winning or losing depends on the placement of each team member. And gold, like any race and battle mode is only affected by your trick score and the number of people in the race. In Coin mode the number of experience you gain also strictly depends on the place you get and how many people you were competing against, but the amount of gold gained comes mostly from the amount of coins you collect and secondly from tricks you do during the course.
Leveling Up and Learning Tricks[ | ]
When you first log in to the game you will be able to select one of three characters available. In order to play a different character on the same account you will have to earn enough gold to purchase a character from the character shop in the mall (25,000 gold). When you gain new levels you can go to the “My Info” tab from the Lobby and learn new tricks by completing a challenge. The harder the trick the higher level you will have to be to learn it. Tricks also cost a small amount of gold to learn.[3] The tricks are in the same style as the SSX games for the Play Station involving over the top fanciness, with the snowboarder often disconnecting and then reconnecting onto the snowboard midair.
Changing Outfits[ | ]
With gold you can purchase new outfits that can add stats. These outfits can either last 7 days or 30 days depending on how much you spend.
Geming and Enhancing[ | ]
Randomly after a race you will be awarded with an ore. With three of the same type of ore (speed, jump, trick, turn, booster, or luck) and a mystery box, purchased at the Magic Shop,you can create different gems. Gems are always one specific color, meaning they can only fit in sockets of that same color. Snowboards and other gear come with sockets of different colors so you have to match correctly.
Cash Shop[ | ]
Currently there is no Cash Shop because the game is still in beta, but one will most likely be implemented when the game is officially released.