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Anyone who appreciated the game back in the days — most likely as a teenager or a young adult — and still can appreciate it today know : The charm of Amped 3 is quite irresistible. It’s the kind of home-made or hand-crafted production that couldn’t be replicated in an era of corporate ambitions and elitist mindset having affected the gaming industry throughout the 2010s for better or for worse, with some fortunate exceptions beyond the scene of Indies.

All of which Amped 3 happen to make fun of through it’s indeed visionary and humor-packed storyline starring an evil corporation led by the main villain and final boss of this unique « Sports / Adventure » game : The diabolical Von Havok barron and his Colonatronic Arts Inc. enterprise (obvious mockery of Electronic Arts and the CIA) planning to take over the world through advanced brainwashing technologies in the form of an addictive videogame named Emag Live (for a reason…) along a cringe Boys band called Ménage à Brahs (a pun of the French expression « Ménage à trois »…) sending subliminal messages through their songs and clips, the happy band of douchebags happening to be led by one abducted member of the snowboarding crew of otherwise five friends — including « You », the Player — going by the Snowforce or the Northstar Crew, set on a quest to rescue one another in a serie of unfortunate events leading « You » to travel on your own in several alpine locations around the world, helped by various pals and circumstancial entities before the « final boss fight » once the crew reunited.

With all of that, the cinematics department is where the developers really delivered all the salt of the game : Action figures in stop motion, Western-Japanese Anime, Scrap-booking styled Vlogs, Sock and hand puppets shows, Live Action advertizings and dubs of old video footages, goofy CGI stuff and animated Superhero Comic strips. Anything goes : It’s like the dev team wanted to use the full spectrum of possibilities of the 7th Art — on top of that, the French Voice Actors nailed it all the way through.

Going back to the graphical and technical aspect of the title having left the realistic sensations of it’s predecesors inside the locker of the Original Xbox era, if it was an unimpressive and even poor game for a Next-Gen showcase only featuring a huge draw distance for the alpine landscapes, the artistic touch had it’s charm in menus and in-game. The stylized character design was cool with good facial expressions and body motions, especially for the female riders, stylish in spite of the slimest body types making them look cartoonishly skinny. On the tracks, the cristaline sceneries and the UI elements create a fresh contrast between snow white and colorful designs, the later at the fashion of the cinematics, making use of distinct art styles from cheesy clip art to cute pixel art and so on. In the end, changing the tone of the serie from realism to a freestyle presentation wasn’t necessarily a bad choice as the developers put their hearts and souls into every aspect of the game.

Snowboarding is once again the core of the game but it also offers some fancy conveyances and additional disciplines like Motorskiing and Deltaplanning among « fairly vehicular items of fortune » — sofa riding and toilet cabin riding to name a few. As in fact the game tends to get inspiration from contemporary Action / Adventure games in sandbox mode, using classic Extreme Sports games mechanics more at the fashion of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater serie this time around, like Agressive Inline or Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX did years before, with a « Specials » feature in slow-motion to add some subtility to an otherwise greatly simplified, arcade and button-smashing type of gameplay, still providing a good library of tricks to have fun cooking the biggest combos possible through the slopes and waves of the pure white snow-covered ski resorts and backcountries. In retrospect, it’s like the Grand Theft Auto of winter sports games with a Tony Hawk’s Underground and a Jackass inspiration of the time — because doing stupid « Don’t Try This At Home » and risky downhill shit on video was the cool trend back then. (Before the Parkour craze took over and claimed more victims…)

Amped 3 is a generous game content-wise, counting 7 spots mostly vast in superficy, 240 main challenges graded from green to black and a good hundred of secondary ones all graded from Bronze to Gold, tons of unlockable outfits and snowboarding equipment, a simple « level editor » allowing to tweak the parks by placing random and rideable elements anywhere around, and lastly hours of music from popular bands of the time making the game weight a good 7.4 Gigabytes in size — the maximum allowed by the initial XGD2 disc format of the Xbox 360.