Ahh snow sports. $80 for a days lift ticket, thousands of dollars worth of accommodation, expensive clothing, getting a raccoon tan from your sunglasses and that's after driving 3 hours or more to get to your favorite resort. Don't get me wrong, I love skiing and the snow but sometimes you just wish it was easier to get to and cheaper to make happen. Luckily for console owners there is no shortage of quality snowboarding games these days and getting up from the couch to put a game in your Xbox is a much easier trip, and quicker! But is it just as much fun?

The original Amped was without doubt a quality title. Great graphics, loads of runs and plenty of challenges. It took just about every available amount of dexterity and patience to improve your ranking and eventually a lot of gamers got to a point where they just couldn't progress any further. Some of the ‘pro challenges' got insanely hard and like myself loads of people eventually gave up on it and went back to the ‘free ride' mode for a quick game from time to time. Amped was a bit disappointing for me in that regard because the number 1 ranking was something I really thought I would be able to earn but no amount of patience saw me attain it.

You control your boarder around and when airborne perform spins and flips with the left analog stick. You perform grabs with the right analog stick, jibs and railslides with the B button and accelerate and jump with the A button. During the runs you can also tweak your grabs, air and railslides by using the right and left triggers, lastly the Y button is used to perform tricks on the ‘lip' or edge of ramps. Actually that isn't everything as the X button is used to do kick tricks in the Snowskate levels. You can also perform a new move called a ‘Butter' that you can use to link tricks to each other to really get massive points happening. If you've played Tony Hawk its exactly the same thing as a ‘manual' and takes quite a bit of practice to get working properly. You quickly tap up and then down for a Tail butter or down and then up for a Nose butter. The main problem I found with the Butter move is during normal speeding up and slowing down while boarding you might find yourself putting your boarder into a butter and crashing by mistake and this could have been easily avoided if the Butter move was activated by the right analog stick instead of the left one. Keep the controls for moving and tricks separate I say.

New to Amped and probably a first in any Snowboarding game is the inclusion of Snowkating. The inventor of this sport must be the best snowboarder on the planet because why would you create something even harder than snowboarding! A Snowskate is basically a smaller board that you ride like a skateboard and isn't strapped onto your feet. Having no bindings frees up the board and lets you perform additional ‘Kick' tricks such as the Heel Flip, Kickflips, Shove-it and the aptly named Impossible. The snowskating is fun but why it's only available on certain runs is a bit of a mystery and in free ride mode I was hoping that the choice of snowboard or snowskate would be available at the start of the run but it isn't.

The difficulty issue was one of the main things I was hoping that Microsoft would address in Amped 2 and in some areas they have. You progress through the Career mode and challenges in each level in exactly the same way as Amped 1. I was really hoping to see the Career mode refined and made more accessible to novice gamers in Amped 2 but that really hasn't happened. Many of the levels are locked until you achieve a certain ranking level and therefore may remain totally inaccessible to many gamers. It would have been better to have one or two runs available from each resort from the start and then be able to work through each level at your own pace. In real life I can visit any resort I like yet in Amped 2 I cannot and it's pretty frustrating. Through beating high score and media score challenges, beating the score of the local pro and impressing the local sponsors which improves your ranking the levels are unlocked. You will also participate in Photo Shoots where you have to run through a series of rings while performing tricks to get to a target score.

There is also the "Own the Mountain' challenge for each resort that include 5 trick challenges, gaps (jumps highlighted by an arc of sparkles) and the Snowmen. Yes the Snowmen are back. Personally I would have preferred to see the Snowmen left out and whoever decided upon some of the locations of them should be stripped down to his or her underwear and dragged behind a Kassbohrer. They are in some absolute crazy spots and really interrupt the flow of your run when trying to find them. You can always hear them in the background chattering away but I really wish they were highlighted better or had just been left out as there is already plenty to do. Once you've completed these challenges on each level there is the Legend Challenge which is the ultimate test of your snowboarding skills.

The controls take a little while to get used to and if you haven't played Amped for a while or you've been playing SSX then they will feel much slower than what you might be expecting. It probably took me half an hour though and I was carving up the powder and performing double backflips and 720's with ease. The new addition to the controls that I really like is the ‘Style' bonus which rewards controlled, smooth tricks and quality over quantity. Normally when doing tricks you just hold the stick as hard as possible to make as many spins or flips that you can but this won't earn you any Style points. Hold the stick about halfway between the edge and the centre and you will see the Style bonus points building up. I've managed to get higher scores this way from doing a single controlled flip with style than I have been from doing double flips with grabs so it's definitely worth your while to practice it.

Lastly your final score for each trick depends on the quality of your landing. If you ‘Stomp' the landing by nailing it perfectly you get a nice point bonus, a ‘Sick' landing isn't as good but still gives you a small reward but a ‘So-So' landing will see no bonus and a ‘Sketchy landing' will see you lost a percentage of your points. Thankfully the landings have been made a bit easier in Amped 2 as you don't have to be perfectly lined up as in Amped 1 but the trade off is the loss of points from making a sketchy landing. It's definitely better than landing on your face though and losing all your points and definitely appreciated.

As seems to be the norm for most sequels this year, more is better and Amped 2 features not just a limited number of ski runs but complete mountains to choose from. You get to select from resorts such as Laax in Switzerland, Harris Mountain in New Zealand, Bear Mountain and even Mt Buller here in Australia! The placement of all the trickable objects and jump locations has been masterfully handled by one of the worlds most famous park designers, Chris ‘Gunny' Gunnarson and his expertise has really paid off. Getting air, landing on and then grinding down the chair lift cable, pulling off a double back flip to then land on another rail, continue another grind and then get back on the snow while racking up 100,000 points in a combo is only possible due to his expert placement of all the objects. The levels themselves look incredible and are absolutely gigantic. You can see for miles and not once did I see any slowdown or popup. The detail doesn't appear overly enhanced from Amped 1 but the size of the new levels and the amount of items such as clothing waiting to be unlocked will keep you busy for ages.

While from the onset it doesn't appear that there are any graphical improvements in Amped 2, one subtle difference is the lighting. Some of the resorts feature night levels and the lighting is top notch. It's only subtle but while boarding down Laax you can see the lights from the village that you board to off in the distance and it really helps make you feel like you are on an actual mountain and not just being led down some linear style level. All that's missing is the fresh air and cold wind on your cheeks.

Multiplayer is one part of Amped 2 that has been totally overhauled. Now with full Xbox Live support it's possible to go online with 8 players. All the great Xbox Live features are supported, Quick match, Opti match, friends list as well as full XSN compatibility which allows you to create a ‘Pack' of boarders or join someone else's. Packs can have 4 to 16 boarders and your Pack's ranking on the XSN ladders is not only affected by how good you are but by how well everyone in your Pack rides. It's a cool system and great for getting some great team based action happening. Hooking up with some other Amped 2 players and boarding around has proved to be a pretty relaxing experience. Sure, you are still competing for the highest score or to perform the best trick but it's great to tag along behind a better player and follow his line. If you're skeptical about how a Snowboarding game would work online then don't be as its loads of fun and a real blast. Now all we need is a virtual restaurant on the summit where you can stop in for a hot chocolate and a chilli hot dog.