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Amped 3 is a pretty standard extreme-sports game. You combo your way through courses, tricking with face-button combos and manuals. Challenges involve following certain routes down the mountain, scoring tens of thousands of points or collecting items.
That's not its main appeal though — the real meat is in the cutscenes. A Canadian sock puppet has you tracking Bigfoot, a disembodied pig's head makes you hurt yourself for money, and the evil overlord of Electronic — I mean "Colonotronic" — Arts attempts to kill you in a pit of lava aboard his Zeppelin.
You can access these insane cutscenes through a minimum of actual snowboarding, and you can probably find it for less than $10, so I think it's fair to review this game as a TV show. It predates Tim and Eric, doesn't quite match it in terms of comedy or obscenity but does it with a handful of nods to classic games that gamers will appreciate.
As I said, it does nothing special in a genre that includes the complexity of EA's Skate or the novelty of any of games that support the Wii's Balance Board. I suck at extreme-sports games though, and found it easy enough to have fun with without getting frustrated. There was only one time — during a challenge that involved grinding on an endless series of tree-branch rails suspended in the air — that I felt like putting it down.
So if you see it at a reasonable price, pick it up! It comes from an era when developers didn't know what to do with achievements, so it's easy with the points. Now-defunct Indie Built went balls-out with a bunch of stupid-ass cutscenes that swap styles every other time you complete a challenge.
[embed:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfmqgbL5TG8 ]
Some dubious racial stereotyping in this game though…