I'm pretty sure that when I play Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip on my balance board, I look like a complete and total idiot. For one, I haven't quite worked out the front to back balance, meaning that I'm either going too fast or too slow. When I do pop off of a jump, I tend to over-exaggerate where I'm putting pressure, meaning I'm either completely on my toes or on my heels, or worse, standing on one foot like a moron. Yes, I look stupid, yes I'm standing on a white, plastic dinner tray, yes I just crashed into the sixteenth tree, but hot dang if this isn't the most fun I've ever had playing a snowboarding game.

Shaun White is off on a globe trekking romp to various mountains and he's asked you to come and find him so that you can do whatever it is that globe trekking snowboarders do. Whenever you get to a new mountain, you'll have a small number of runs unlocked with each run being a race, a half-pipe or a trick run. Each run has two goals, a dare goal that nets you event tickets to unlock additional runs and a respect goal that nets you memento pieces. The two goals for each run sometimes build on each other, say, 1500 points in a run for the dare and 2500 for the respect run, but in other cases, they go against each other as in finishing a race within 2:00 for the dare run and collecting six pieces of trash in the run for the respect run. In these cases, how you play the run varies wildly and allows the game to effectively provide two runs for the price of one.

This is a good thing, because it's not like content abounds here. There are five mountains, with each mountain having four to five runs and each run having one or two events. Once you finally catch up with Shaun White, and add him to your roster, more challenging events open up which helps to lengthen the experience. That's not to say that you can breeze through all of the events no problem. Not so. Many of the respect runs are best tackled by riders you don't have access to at that point in the mountain, so even though you may have completed a run so that you can move on to the next one, the respect goal may elude you until you can get different riders.

The riders are as globe spanning as the locations, and all have a friendly way about them. The game eschews the eXtreme style that so many alternative sports games adhere to, instead providing a nice, casual group of riders. Each rider has different stats so that one may be better at racing while one is better at jumping, and each rider provides a different special power when acting as a cameraperson. Picking the right combination of rider and cameraperson is crucial to nailing the different events and add a fun, experimental vibe to the game yet isn’t so important that you feel penalized for making the wrong choice.

Once on the slopes, you can use either the balance board or the Wiimote to control your rider; however the real fun of the game comes with using the balance board. You place the board so that you stand with your side facing the TV, as if you were on a real snowboard. In this mode, leaning towards the screen puts you in a tuck, speeding you up at the cost of quick turns. Leaning away from the screen makes you slow down but makes it easier to turn. Leaning left or right turns you…left or right. To jump you make a jumping motion on the board, however actually leaving the board will net you a stern rebuke from your console. Well, as stern as Nintendo gets anyway. Once you're in the air, the real fun begins with a combination of board pressure and Wiimote buttons determining what kinds of tricks you do. Front flips, back flips, side rotations, toe grabs, nose grabs, they're all possible based on how you're leaning on the board and what buttons you're pressing.

Where the problems occur is when you're holding on to a trick to the very last second, land and now because you've been leaning one way or another, those leanings affect your riding. Half pipe runs suffer the most from this as you're constantly going from trick to trick. As a result, you have to let go of tricks a little earlier than you might want to so that you have time to set your feet before landing. There will be the occasional misread by the balance board resulting in your rider fidgeting from trick to trick without ever staying on something long enough to register as a trick, but those moments are few and far between.

The Wiimote is a more straightforward affair. You hold the controller like a snowboard and twist it right for any right turns, twist it left for left turns and point down or up to speed up or slow down. Tricks are much more of a grab bag with the Wiimote as you may do the same motions after two jumps and end up with two different tricks, however in both cases you'll probably nail something huge. Which brings us to the biggest problem with the Wiimote—namely that it's too easy. If the balance board makes half pipes too challenging, the Wiimote makes it a total breeze. More of a middle ground with both control schemes would have been nice, however if you want to use the balance board on everything but the half-pipes, switching over to the Wiimote just so that you'll get through it and get your event ticket, we won't blame you, especially because we did the same thing and by we I mean me.