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Is there something about the SBK Series that you don't like, or needed improving on?
For me, it's a couple of aspects of SBK2. While I love the game, I don't really like how the Expert A.I. tends to gang up on you. And I HATE that you have to be so darn percise with the control stick when throwing bombs backwards. And while the game's courses are fun, they are a little too bumpy for my tastes, I prefered SBK1/Plus's course terrain, nice and smooth.
Oh, and inb4SBKDS. Be original people!
Behold The almighty Couch Inc. Superior to all Co.s and Inc.s
everywhere. Especially that darned Maltinie Co. Hee Hee
My introduction page was the only one to have four pages!
One thing I don't like is about SBK1 : The shops on the courses. If you don't have enough money to buy something, it blocks you like a wall, and if someone else takes it before you, the shop sign can push you if you run into it. This happens very often in Night Highway in that part where the road is narrow and it's easy to get pushed down the cliff, and there's a shop conveniently placed there to make it happen very often.
Good thing they fixed that in SBK2, or else Expert mode would've been a living heck, more than it already is.
My main issue would probably be the short length of the games. They can all be cleared within an hour or two, and that's if you don't beat all courses right away. Of course I'm not including multiplayer here, as that has virtually no end.
Single player is short, even if they try to make it look longer in plus and SBK DS by having you run through the game once with each character, it feels a bit... artificial, to extend lifespan with this only.
Next up is balance issues. It's okay I guess to have evolution in the gear you're going to use, so buying new stuff actually has a point. But in the end, everyone is going to be using the same board, and mostly the same characters. Sadly it's pretty much impossible to get every character/board at the same level by the end of the game, but it would be fun to see them try to get as close to balanced as they can.
And finally, this only applies to SBK2: no really hard track. SBK1 had Quicksand Valley, and uh... I don't know about SBK DS, but there aren't really hard tracks in SBK2, difficulty always comes from evil AIs, and not the tracks themselves. While some were interesting to go through and offered some challenges here and there, but I played as Linda and never switched from balanced board and had no trouble, whereas in SBK1, beating some stages with the same settings requires tons of skill.
Then again, that might just be me, I don't know...
A few things that didn't like about SBK1 was the rubber-band A.I. You could be Tommy using a Star Board and they would still catch up to you! I think it was the worst in Quicksand Valley. No wonder it always took me forever to beat that course when I was little.
And I agree, the courses themselves in SBK2 were way too easy. Some weren't hard, but just annoying, like Haunted House.
I never understood why SBK2 didn't have anything resembling a Time Attack like in the first game. It's a racing game, it's practically a requirement!
I think the Speed Cross (the mini-game where you had to race to school) was the closest thing to a Time Attack, as it displayed your time when you cleared it.
Oh, and that reminds me, the "You Lose/Time Over" music in SBK2 scared the heck out of me when I was little.
Behold The almighty Couch Inc. Superior to all Co.s and Inc.s
everywhere. Especially that darned Maltinie Co. Hee Hee
My introduction page was the only one to have four pages!
nicole couch @ Jun 4 2011, 10:38:35 PM wrote: Oh, and that reminds me, the "You Lose/Time Over" music in SBK2 scared the heck out of me when I was little.
Dang, you and me both. The shops kicking people out didn't bother me as much, in fact I wished that there was some way to toggle it on and off in the options for SBK2. What I don't like about it is when a person in front of you gets the weapon/item while you hit the icon as its down, deflecting your travel direction. Countless falls resulted from that *coughcoughnighthighwaycough*
As for SBK2 apart from perceiving the bosses as cheap, I really got no complaints.
Finally got a copy of SBK1 after first renting it ages ago.
I felt in general the unlockable characters across all the games were always purposely designed to be superior to the default characters, which TBH I'm not really a fan of, primarily in cases with human players where all but one player picks a non-secret character, making it very difficult for players with default characters/boards to win.
Oh yeah, and this happened with a default character as well, SBK+'s Ruby Green. He was just Tommy with half a star extra in the Trick stat.
The "You Lose/Time Over" music in SBK2 scared the heck out of me when I was little.
With me, the two things that scared me about the second game when I was little was the scene when Damien pops out of the ground in the "Enter Damien" cutscene, combined with the creepy music, and the faces of the snowmen created when a player is open fired at with the Snowman weapon.
SBK1: Rubber-band AI, where the computer players seem to catch up to you with ridiculous speed even when you far exceed their speed. (Example: Tommy on Alpine 3, even Nancy will catch up to you.)
SBK2: Lack of unique tricks, I know that SBK2 was made to expand more on customizing your own tricks, but I liked the fact that the tricks made picking each character a lot more unique. I still say that combining the aspects of SBK1 and SBK2's trick systems would make for quite a powerful gaming combination.
SBK:DS: Too much I didn't like about it to really list here, I'd be here all day doing so.
- Linda
Linda Maltinie: Snowboard Princess of Snow Town For the Pride of Maltinie Company! The Couch Corporation crumbles under the Maltinie Company!
*This Message Brought to you by the Butlers and Servants at Linda's Castle: "Do remember, our little Princess is the TRUE Number 1!"*
Does the save data for SBK1 really have to take up ALL OF THE SPACE ON THE FREAKING CONTROLLER PAK? I can't tell you how many times we tried to save data for other N64 games, failed, and then remembered that SBK was taking up all the room. Cue the process of remorsefully deleting the data to make room for the new stuff.
And having to beat the game all. over. again. (Unless you know THE CODE...)
Raichu862000 @ Sep 30 2013, 06:04:09 AM wrote: Does the save data for SBK1 really have to take up ALL OF THE SPACE ON THE FREAKING CONTROLLER PAK? I can't tell you how many times we tried to save data for other N64 games, failed, and then remembered that SBK was taking up all the room. Cue the process of remorsefully deleting the data to make room for the new stuff.
And having to beat the game all. over. again. (Unless you know THE CODE...)
I found a nice workaround for losing the data, I managed to get multiple controller packs that I have that overwrite each other with the most current data, so that I will never lose my data!
...also, no more swapping the controller pack around! It's win-win!
- Linda
Linda Maltinie: Snowboard Princess of Snow Town For the Pride of Maltinie Company! The Couch Corporation crumbles under the Maltinie Company!
*This Message Brought to you by the Butlers and Servants at Linda's Castle: "Do remember, our little Princess is the TRUE Number 1!"*
Raichu862000 @ Sep 30 2013, 02:04:09 AM wrote:Does the save data for SBK1 really have to take up ALL OF THE SPACE ON THE FREAKING CONTROLLER PAK? I can't tell you how many times we tried to save data for other N64 games, failed, and then remembered that SBK was taking up all the room. Cue the process of remorsefully deleting the data to make room for the new stuff.
And having to beat the game all. over. again. (Unless you know THE CODE...)
I've had to buy a Memory Card X4 to save SBK1, which is literally like having 4 memory cards in one. Just switch it from 1 to 4 and save in whichever you want.
That memory pack I tried using before, but it would corrupt any time I switched controllers on it.
I find just mirroring 4 packs and having them on separate controllers works easier when I want to get everyone to just pick-up-and-play rather than passing around one memory pack and hoping for the best. Also helps in case one goes out, I can just re-mirror it.
- Linda
Linda Maltinie: Snowboard Princess of Snow Town For the Pride of Maltinie Company! The Couch Corporation crumbles under the Maltinie Company!
*This Message Brought to you by the Butlers and Servants at Linda's Castle: "Do remember, our little Princess is the TRUE Number 1!"*
I have felt the same pain in regards to SBK1 save data, why DOES the save take up the entire memory pack? I remember reading somewhere (I think it was GameFAQS) that there is some bug in the coding that makes the game think it requires an entire memory pak to save the game. And don't get me started on when your save corrupts for NO REASON AT ALL.
Glad they fixed this issue in SBK2 where the save data is stored on the actual cart itself.
- The rubber band A.I. It still gives me hell. The only other racing game on N64 I remember suffering from it worse was Mario Kart 64.
- The memory card stuff, no more explanation needed.
- Ninja Land. Looking back, for being the final course in the game, it's somewhat anti-climatic. I mean, it's very colourful and visually impressive, but it's SO SHORT. It's not even that hard once you figure out that Shinobin only goes through item boxes (not turn invisible whenever he wanted to like I used to think when I was a kid) and you just have to keep ahead of him and make sure goes through as few of them as possible. Silver Mountain would've been a much more fitting choice for the last course in the game as it had a much more "final level" feel to it.
- Apart from having an invisibility item, there really isn't a lot you can do to defend yourself from shots. Yeah, you can jump over them, but you can't look behind you so you basically have to guess when to jump. Thankfully they fixed that in SBK2.
SBK+
- The downgraded graphics and sound, the Playstation was a much more powerful console than the N64, so there really wasn't any excuse for why the game looked worse than the original. The game also suffered from bad slowdowns (but then again I've only played it on an emulator so maybe it's better on console?).
- The game intro is fully animated but the opening cutscene and endings are just slideshows? That always bugged me.
- The animations for the characters are really choppy and all the characters share the same animations for turning, even the big guys like Tommy and Ruby.
- Even though the characters had different stats, they all handled the same to me. Even when I played with a "Speed" type like Linda, Tommy, Nicole or Ruby, they didn't seem to go any faster than the other characters.
- This is more of a weird thing to note than a gripe, but according to the storyline, Pamela is often away from school filming movies, so she would be the least experienced when it came to snowboarding, wouldn't she? But she has the best stats out of all the characters aside from the ninjas! Two stars for speed and THREE stars for cornering? Really?
- Two or three new courses wouldn't have been a bad idea, considering this was basically an expansion from the N64 game. I mean, you had new characters, alternate costumes, alternate hair colours, endings, two new paint designs... but no new courses?
- Maybe this game was rushed to meet the release deadline? It's still a fun game to play and I love all the extra things they put in, but in retrospect it could've been a lot better. It would've been interesting if this was ported to the N64 Disk Drive, like F Zero X's expansion was.
SBK2
- The courses are too easy, the main challenge comes from the enemy A.I. deflecting everything you throw at them.
- The pans come out way too fast. Even when I have my invisibility item ready I'll still not be fast enough to activate it and get hit by the pans.
- The lack of special tricks.
- When you play single player battle mode, the computer always uses whatever board you will use. Want to obliterate the A.I. with the Dragon Board? Yeah, not gonna happen.
- Unlike in SBK1, you have no invincibility frames when you are knocked down, which means your opponents can "combo" you with all different shots as they pass by and there's nothing you can do about it. So cheap.
- Speaking of cheap, how about when someone throws a backwards bomb at you as you're getting of the lift? ARGGGGHHH!
- The gameplay is very slow when you aren't using Level 3 boards or Special boards.
- The wings are probably the most useless item in any racing game ever.
- No Time Attack mode.
Not gonna bother with SBKDS, for obvious reasons.
Behold The almighty Couch Inc. Superior to all Co.s and Inc.s
everywhere. Especially that darned Maltinie Co. Hee Hee
My introduction page was the only one to have four pages!
*coughcoughnighthighwaycough* 
I remember reading somewhere (I think it was GameFAQS) that there is some bug in the coding that makes the game think it requires an entire memory pak to save the game. And don't get me started on when your save corrupts for NO REASON AT ALL.
