Hamster Corporation is on something of a winning streak, with the fantastic Arcade Archives series continually dusting off and polishing hundreds of notable games from the annals of history. Well, those wizards are back with the fresh Console Archives brand, and the now 30-year-old ‘radical’ PlayStation sports game Cool Boarders is one of the first. Yes, 1996, three whole years before anything Tony Hawk-related would reach consoles.
Much like the difference between skateboarding and snowboarding, in Cool Boarders, your character feels heavy, and your movements must be slow and deliberate if you want to pull off tricks. All this while carving fresh powder to avoid hitting trees or plummeting to a mountainous death. ‘B’ lets you jump, which will build speed and help you initiate tricks when leaping off heights. Meanwhile, ‘Y’ works as the Drift button, letting you quickly change direction and better handle corners.
Ultimately, you are aiming to either get the highest trick score or the best time on each of the courses. You’ll start out meagrely, shrugging yourself off a ledge and maybe pulling off a 180, but there’s a high skill ceiling waiting to be found. When you ready a jump, the amount of time you press and hold a directional button before you leap dictates how fast you spin. Combine this with a Grab by holding ‘R’, and with a bit of patience, you’ll be hurtling down courses while pulling off sick 900 Nosegrabs.
Thankfully, the stubborn gameplay is accentuated with great and suitably audacious ’90s music, and some silly but nostalgic sound effects and narration. But, compared to its favourably reviewed peer, 1080 Snowboarding, Cool Boarders doesn’t quite compete in either the pure fun of the gameplay or the amount of content.
Hamster has preserved the visuals beautifully, glitches and all. Here, the PS1 original’s 240p pixels are polished and presented faithfully, especially compared to the smooth anti-aliasing sheen found in the 2024 PS5 version, but anyone hoping for any upscaling options is out of luck. You can play around with the aspect ratio, either to fill the screen or condense it to perfect-pixel parity, but there’s not much in the way of borders or other presentation options. However, the emulation seems to run perfectly, with no noticeable drops in frame rate or frame pacing, and thankfully, the CRT filters are gorgeous.
One issue is that while there is Quick Save and Quick Load, I would have just preferred a rewind option, or something as wild as the ability to slow the game’s speed. I mapped the Save/Load buttons to the controller, but it still got things muddled up. Rewind would feel better, especially in a game where one mistake can ruin a run.
Neither the visuals nor the gameplay has aged as gracefully as 1080, but Hamster has done good work in presenting the snowy vistas and demanding gameplay for the modern day. Cool Boarders is a blast to play for short sessions, especially if you loved it back in the ’90s, and while a couple of extra options might have been nice, this is the best way to play this beloved early entry in the ‘extreme’ sports genre.
