Cool Boarders 3

COOL 3-door shares retirees and emotion of snowboarding to the PlayStation. click Choose from over 13 different riders and 22 boards, then 34 courses. Career goes as fast as possible into the checkpoint and slalom, or focus on high towers in the halfpipe, slope style and big air events. For those who want to test all their skills, try the tournament mode and compete in five events. When competition becomes too much, trying to develop all the movements in practice mode. If your friends think the bottom of the mountain, you can put money where their mouth with the two-player mode. No matter how you play, the analog control makes taking charge of the action easier than ever. The three measures keep the border COOL burns boarding busy for days

Product Details

Amazon Sales Rank: #10028 in Video Games

Brand: COOL BOARDERS 3 (SONY PLAYSTATION CD-ROM VIDEO GAME VERSION)

Model: SONY GAME

ESRB Rating: Everyone

Platform: PlayStation

Features

ALL TIME CLASSIC

GREAT BOARDING GAME

GREAT FOR ALL AGES

ALL-TIME FAVORITE

HARD GAME TO FIND

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Editorial Reviews

GameSpot Review
Cool Boarders 3 is drastically different from its predecessors. And unfortunately for fans of the series, it's not the good kind of different. Sure, it looks a whole lot better and has a ton of tracks and events to try, but the bottom line is that it just isn't much fun to play.

One reason it fails is the game's new control scheme. Even after hours of trying to get used to the control, you'll still be wishing it was set up like Cool Boarders 2. The control doesn't have that precise, in-control feeling when you're executing tricks, although when using the Dual Shock, the analog stick is rather nice to use for basic boarding. The new jump meter is an unnecessary pain and ends up forcing you to play extremely mechanically. You have to press and hold the jump button down at the right moment when you're approaching a jump so the indicator is at the height of the meter when you release the button. While it may not sound too menacing, once you give it a try you'll know just how much of a pain it is.

Course quality is another factor that leads to the game's overall lameness. Sure it has 34 tracks, but they're all mostly short and narrow. The developers seem to try to compensate for this by making events like the half pipe best out of three. The new events like boardercross, slalom, and slope style are welcome additions to the game.

In addition to the bad control and weak course design, you'll miss the carefree feeling of happily boarding down the mountain. Instead, that's been replaced with Road Rash-style punching on the course. I'm usually all for fighting, but it's so out of place and so poorly implemented that it might as well not even be in the game.

The graphics are Cool Boarders 3's shining moment. The terrain, snow, and trees all look really good. The animation of the different boarders as they elegantly carve down the mountainside, pulling off moves and grabs, is all very fluid. Even the new interface and art look fairly impressive. While the sound effect for the board scraping over patches of ice in the snow is an exceptionally nice effect, the sound and music overall are fair.

Unfortunately, Cool Boarders 3 isn't the sequel we had all hoped for - changing developers for this third game really hurt the series a lot. --Ryan Mac Donald
--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc.

Manufacturer Description
Grab your board get your lift ticket and get ready to shred some serious snow in Cool Boarders 3 for PlayStation. A brand new 3D game engine gives you lifelike characters and panoramic courses with real-time rendering for the most realistic snowboarding experience. Take on 32 new beautifully designed courses with razor sharp turns intimidating jumps challenging moguls slippery ice and more. Hidden courses include an Avalanche and Tree Run where flawless control is mandatory. Choose from 16 Burton 6 Ride and 1 Swatch snowboards that are individually designed with their own specific ratings. The boards are created with the same tendencies as the real boards like control acceleration responsiveness and flexibility. Pull off the classic moves like reverse 360s Front Side 540's Rodeo & Misty Flips Board Slides Tailgrabs and Stalefish. Perform 35 tricks plus thousands of different combinations of grabs spins and flips.

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Customer Reviews

Hard start, fun in between, but like any game, gets old.
Cool Boarders 3 is more advanced than Cool Boarders 1 or 2. It is the best of snowboarding games out there although this game is particularly more difficult to ascertain a hold on it. It's tricks are very elaborate but the speed of the game and the difficulty of the tricks make it a hard game to master. Going to the learning section on the game is probably the best tecnique before trying to master the halfpipe or even the regular arcade. =) Is that any help?

Cool Boarders 3
Cool Boarders 3 is a great snowboarding game. As soon as I began to play it, I loved it much more than Cool Boarders 2. This game has awesome graphics of the snowboarders while they are on the course. Also some of the backgrounds are flat-out amazing but the trees and stumps could've been a lot better. This game uses fast realistic-style Snowboarding for enough fun to last a while. This game also includes tons of awesome new tricks. Also the number of different modes is great but when you play angainst the CPU the game is just plain easy. I give it 4 out of 5 so it is still a very cool game. I haven't played Cool Boarders 4 but I can only imagine what EA has done this time...

not so coolboarders
this game did not live up to the name "cool boarder" it is the worst of the four and i rcemend you purchase coolboarders 2

Price: $41.94

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Twisted Metal III

Feel your car is waxed. destructive 3-D engine. Bad songs from Rob Zombie.

Product Details

Amazon Sales Rank: #6288 in Video Games

Brand: Sony

Released on: 1998-11-11

ESRB Rating: Teen

Platform: PlayStation

Number of items: 1

Features

1-4 Players

Rated "T"

Multi Tap Adaptable

Vibration Function Compatible

Analog Controller Compatible

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Editorial Reviews

Editorial Review
Combining the road rage-inspired dark fantasies of Mad Max with a twist of campy black humor, Twisted Metal III is a worthy addition to the emerging car combat genre. Though the game is sure to be a hit with newcomers of the series, fans of the previous Twisted Metal games will find that TM III doesn't quite fire on all cylinders.

The story runs somewhere between Mortal Kombat and your wildest dreams of demolition derbies. But the paper-thin plot doesn't matter: you have a rad car and aren't afraid to use it. Whether you choose to control the monster truck driven by the little old lady, Mr. Grimm's motorcycle o' death, or what is quite possibly the coolest ice-cream truck ever, you'll speed and skid around the asphalt-covered levels, grabbing power-ups and blowing up your opponents with a wide array of vehicle-mounted weaponry.

In a game like this, several things are key: physics, control, and level design. Twisted Metal III departs from the previous games in the franchise. The levels are smaller and the physics and controls conspire to make the vehicles handle oddly. The bottom line: car-smashing fun that doesn't quite live up to the glories of the prequels. --John Cocking

Pros:

Cool vehicles

The London level

Knocking your foes off the rooftops in Tokyo

Cons:

Driving in reverse using the analog controls

There are some small, small levels

GameSpot Review
If you've made it to this point in your life without playing a Twisted Metal game, that's all right, we'll explain it to you. The trilogy is probably best described as a vehicular version of Midway's Mortal Kombat or else a James Cameron's Terminator take on a demolition derby. In it, a horde of over-the-top characters compete against each other in cars and trucks armed with missiles, freeze rays, and other assorted weapons of destruction. This time out, there are a few new cars and weapons, and you have an option to have a computer-controlled ally aide you in the tournament, though he always seems to be the first one blown up in the fight. The biggest change to the series though is that its developer has changed from SingleTrac (who've started a new, but like-minded, auto-combat series under the moniker Rogue Trip for GT Interactive) to 989 Studios, a Sony-owned development studio. This affects the game on nearly every level.

Graphically, the game appears much differently from the previous titles in the line, though it's not necessarily improved. There are various shading and lighting effects at work, but the end result is somehow grainy and washed out. The title's soundtrack, which is comprised of songs by Rob Zombie and Pitch Shifter, is very fitting, but the supporting sound effects are very weak. For example, the machine gun sounds like a cap pistol and driving through water inexplicably sounds pretty similar to that.

The game's much-touted new physics engine turns out pretty strange in function. The cars will now dip and roll upon collision, which sounds fantastic in theory, but in practice is fairly questionable since vehicles will often flip over after hitting a small curb or even a snowman. The collision detection is also highly suspect, as instances where you'll find yourself stuck on a ledge or halfway into a wall are frequent. It's very nice to have analog control this time, but the physics engine really works against it.

The main downfall of Twisted Metal III though is its lackluster level design. Most of the stages are, if not modeled after, extremely reminiscent of levels from the first two games, and those that aren't are even more uninspired. The Washington level, for instance, is a long rectangular courtyard with a ramped area on one end and teleportation sphere (which sends vehicles to the ramped area) on the other. Snore.

In the two player modes, the default horizontal split-screen runs into the same problem found in SingleTrac's Rogue Trip. Since the levels are no longer as flat as in the previous TM games, having half you horizon cut away makes it hard to see in hilly or ramp-heavy levels. Fortunately, the designers had the foresight to include a wide variety of split-screen perspectives, such as a vertical cut and variations on a four-way split where the other two boxes are filled with radar, speedometer, and weapons info (these are the best since you view the world through a smaller version of the full screen). In the three- and four-player modes, the perspective is similarly cornered. Both appear to cut into the frame rate and increase the visible seams between surfaces, but not majorly. Multiple views aside though, the game is as much fun in multiplayer mode as it is in single player. As there, you'll be struck with the feelings of "Why am I here?" and "Why am I playing this" after a level or two.

There are a few good ideas at work within Twisted Metal III (such as the multiple perspectives), but they're not nearly enough to counter the fact that improvements to the gameplay are pretty slight and the level design is a big step backwards, making the game a real lemon overall. If this is the direction the series is taking, it should probably stop right here. Take a look at Activision's Vigilante 8 or GT Interactive's Rogue Trip instead.

--Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited. GameSpot and the GameSpot logo are trademarks of GameSpot Inc.

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Customer Reviews

Worst of the TM series
TM3 is nothing like the first two of the Twisted Metal series and it's not nearly as good either. The only improvement from the first 2 TM games are the graphics. The sound is about the same and everything else about it just sucks. The control ruins the rest of the game. Just about everytime you even get nudged by another vehicle or fall off a cliff, you end up upside down and that's what I really didn't like about TM3. When you get turned upside down, it slows you down and it gets frustrating. The control is not good at all when you compare it to TM2. You can't turn on a dime no more. The control is so messed up it ruins just about all of the fun factor and replay value.

The only thing good about TM3 is the improved graphics. The levels are laid out pretty good and there's not as many pixels anymore, but like I said the control ruins the whole game. This is the worst of the Twisted Metal series. Twisted Metal 2 is still the best and Twisted Metal 4 is the second best.

Listen...
Well, this game sure LOOKED cool at first, glancing at the back of the game, and reading about it. New characters, weapons, stages, where can you go wrong? Plus it was the sequel to Twisted Metal 2 (which is an awesome game). So I thought I was all set.

Let me just that 989 Studios destroyed this game and I was really dissappointed. The worst part about the game was the awful control system. Not only was it horribly slow, but the handling was awful! And it seemed like everytime a "contestant" fell off a building or was hit by another contestant, he/she flipped over and wouldn't retain movement again for 5 seconds.

The soundtrack was ok, but after hearing it time and time again, it got kinda irritating.

Having new characters was a good idea, but they were pretty stupid as well. Not to mention their descriptions, which had to have been the cheesiest thing ever.

The weapons were pretty cool, though. I liked how they added rain missles, speed missles, etc...but once again, the gameplay was so slow + sluggush, it only provided minor and limited entertainment.

Twisted Metal 2 is a really great buy, get that. The gameplay is so much faster (and better) and it is so much more fun. TM2 I give 4.5 stars.

just plain terrible
TM3 is one of the worst games I have ever played. TM2 is probably the best playstation game around, which was my basis for buying TM3. The characters and the descriptions of the cars are sooo cheesy. Some of the race tracks are pretty cool but they are small. The cars in this version are also incredibly difficult to control. The Rob Zombie- and-friends soundtrack is ok but after playing the game for a while the repetitive songs get annoying. 989 studios ruined this game. I do on the other hand recommend Twisted Metal 1 and 2. They are great.(since they are done by Singletrac)

Price: $19.20

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