1080° is built from quality stuff, Snowboard Kids is a lot of fun and Twisted Edge is dodgy, but has a few almost neat ideas. Big Mountain 2000, however, is just completely bland. There are a bunch of uninteresting characters to choose from, and a whopping four courses with nothing to make them feel distinct from each other.

The biggest difference is that you can choose between snowboarding and skiing. The turning feels slightly different, but otherwise they play in the same way. If you turn too much, you’ll fall over, so you’ll need to use A to brake to balance yourself (yes, it feels really odd – B is also jump).

As you travel down the courses, you’ll be able to do tricks (like many other snowboarding games on the N64, it’s simply better to not do so) and at random points you’ll just fall over for no reason whatsoever.

In order to inflate the length of the game to around one hour, your characters start off awful. Play matches and you’ll randomly get upgrades to your stats until you can win everything. There are three kinds of race, a basic race and two types slalom races, and you need to get first on all in both snowboard and ski on the first three tracks to unlock the fourth – that’s a lot of repetition on three similar tracks.

Big Mountain 2000 isn’t broken or buggy or terribly designed, it’s just bland. This also likely felt extremely dated when it came out in the USA roughly two years after the Japanese release (called Snow Speeder).

Poor

Five minutes after you walk away you’ll be struggling to remember you’ve played it.

James Ashton, N64 Magazine #26. Review Score: 71%

Remake or Remaster?

There’s nothing special about this.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to play Big Mountain 2000