I've decided that I'm gonna start doing mini-reviews on retro games, on account of I have a shit ton of 'em. How I got them or whether they're legal copies is my business and nobody else's. But I'll be reviewing games for just about any platform that isn't one of the current ones (PS3, 360, Wii, DS/3DS, PSP). I probably won't be doing many PC games either, but I might do a couple. Other than that, I'm open to any suggestions for games to review, whether it's a PS2 game or it's a Vectrex masterpiece.

Keep in mind, though, that my reviews are gonna be emulation oriented. If a particular title isn't playable in any emulator for it's respective platform, I can't give it a better review than simply describing how unplayable or broken it is in the best emulator for the platform. I won't be trying every game out on every conceivable emulator, but if a game doesn't work on my personal favorites, I'll try to see if I can't get it to work in another one. So I'll denote in each review exactly what emulator and plugins I was using when playing the game.

Without further ado, I'll kick off my first review. More of an initial impression from playing the game for about 3 hours total over the last 2 days than an actual in-depth review, but whatever.

Cool Boarders 2001

Platform: PlayStation

Emulator: PCSX-Reloaded 1.9.92

Gfx: SoftGL Driver 1.1.17

Snd: Mac OS X Sound 1.6.0

It took me about 30 minutes before I gave up trying to learn the controls on my own and referred to the control mapping option in the game's menu to see each button's function. It took me another 30 minutes after that to get used to the controls. After that though, the game transforms into something playable. Whether it's fun or not depends on how much frustration you can tolerate though. If you enjoy games that keep kicking your ass over and over like Demon's Souls, you'll probably feel right at home with this game.

The game has a number of different event types, ranging from simply trying to rack up a certain number of points solo to racing two other snowboarders while going through checkpoints. Each event is more frustrating than the last. I tried to at least win a single event before writing this review, but the events are quite frustrating. The first trickmaster event requires you to accumulate 15000 points by the end of the course, but I've only managed just under 7000. The gates event requires you to go through a series of gates on the course, missing only up to four of them. While simultaneously racing two opponents. Not too bad. Except there's red gates and blue gates. Red gates you just need to pass through, but blue gates you need to be doing a trick when you're going through them. Still not too bad, right? That is until the boneheaded AI opponents ram into you just before a blue gate, causing you to lose all your speed, preventing you from successfully doing a trick while passing through that blue gate. They do this frequently and there are many blue gates, making it quite difficult to complete this challenge. That is unless every move you make from the very beginning is utterly flawless so that the opponents are far behind you. In that case, the physics will decide to go nuts on your ass towards the end of the event and the AI opponents will overtake you.

Quite simply, this game is frustrating. Even saving is frustrating. Not entirely so, as it pretty much autosaves and loads after the first save, but I was mashing the X button to get through that initial save. Big mistake, as the game asks you to pick a block on the memory card to save your Cool Boarders data to. Not unusual, but unlike most games, it doesn't hide the data of other games or tell you that the block's used by something else. It allows you to overwrite any block of data on the card with your new Cool Boarders save, and the cursor's default position will be at the beginning of the memory card where there's bound to be save data from another game unless Cool Boarders is the first PlayStation game you're using that particular memory card with. So mashing X to get through the first save means something's getting overwritten, which in my case was just a very unimportant Bushido Blade save. But can you imagine if it was something like FFVII? That would be quite painful, I'd imagine.

Despite the flaws though, it is admittedly an enjoyable thrill to be speeding down a mountain on a virtual snowboard. I made a lot of attempts to pass that first gate event, while normally I'd just shut off a game if it wasn't letting me win. So I suppose it's a masochistically enjoyable kind of frustrating, like Demon's Souls.