Soul Ride | Features | Support FAQ | Downloads Soul Ride Features Features Locations Mammoth Mountain Tuckerman Ravine Soul Ride's action takes place on and around Mammoth Mountain in California and Tuckerman Ravine in New Hampshire. Slingshot has created a cutting-edge continuous level-of-detail rendering engine to display these vast terrains in true 3D. The background mountains you see in the screenshots are not painted or pre-rendered images -- they are part of a seamless 3D model which extends for over 20 miles in every direction. The topography and ground coverage are based on data from the US Geological Survey, so the vistas you see in the game closely resemble the vistas you would see in real life. We have painstakingly hand-tuned the terrain to provide a pulse-pounding and breathtaking riding experience down 15 pre-defined routes. You can also use the Heli-Drop feature to drop yourself anywhere you want, and explore every nook and cranny of these expansive wilderness areas. Character Physics Advanced driving and flying games have featured detailed physics models for years. But snowboarding games have generally had to use canned motions, either from mo-cap or hand animation, to breath life into the riders, because the actual physics of human figures is mind-bogglingly complex. At Slingshot we weren't satisfied with canned animation, and as a result of an intense R&D effort, Soul Ride is the first snowboarding game to break through the character physics barrier, basing all rider motions on a detailed physics model. Every carve, jump, bounce and spin is unique; the result of an intricate simulation including factors such as the terrain surface and slope, the position and velocity of every limb in the rider's body, and of course the input from the player. Open-ended Gameplay Soul Ride gives you a series of fifteen predefined backcountry descents, filled with natural kickers, quarter-pipes, rollers, glades, steeps and chutes. The game keeps score, rewarding you for fast lines and daring stunts, so you can compete for bragging rights. But even the starter runs provide endless opportunities for creative riding. There are no artificial boundaries and no time limits, and everything you can see is potentially ridable. Use the defined starting points or find your own using the Heli-Drop, have fun and express yourself. The game engine stores every detail of your run in the Virtual VCR so you can replay, slo-mo, save to disk and even email your recording to a friend. Rollicking Soundtrack Rather than commission a batch of slick but bland "hard" tunes or license a grab bag of the record industry's latest product du jour, we picked out fourteen songs we actually like, from 100% gen-u-ine indie labels Bloodshot, Mint and Ringing Ear. Featuring the insurgent country sounds of Waco Brothers, the sixteen-eyed geek-core of Sinkhole and the sublime, smoldering Neko Case And Her Boyfriends, plus six other acts you can't do without, this is one videogame soundtrack you may find yourself playing on your stereo or in your car. Nevertheless, we know from hard experience that even the best game soundtrack will wear thin if listened to ad infinitum, and you probably have a perfectly good pile of your own CDs that go great with surfing backcountry powder. So the Soul Ride engine will happily shuffle-play any CD audio disk you put in the drive, or just get out of the way if you want to listen to MP3s. Here are a couple MP3's from the soundtrack: New Sweet Breath "B-Liner" [2.2 MB] Bender "Soap Opera" [2.2 MB] Look for more audio samples on the record-label sites: Bloodshot Records Mint Records Ringing Ear Records System Requirements Pentium II-300MHz or better PC running Windows 9x, NT4 or 2000 64MB RAM An OpenGL-capable video card Joystick or Catapult controller