For starters, this game serves up a superb "out of the box experience." The greenest console novice can pick it up and quickly start to enjoy it. I ran a "field test" at a friend’s house, where they’d never played an XBox before. Here was a roomful of kids 4-14 who had also never snowboarded, either. Yet they were racking up good scores and smiling broadly right away, even the 4-year-old. So someone who has never played a single snowboarding game can get in a nice first run on Amped.

But to get big points you have to do tricks, and there are many to master. The basic stuff isn’t too bad, but some of the advanced moves are downright intimidating. Complicated button work is the only real weak point to the game, but it’s the old two-edged sword of striving for complexity while keeping it simple. For the most part, this title does everything you could ask for in its niche. Maybe more obstacles like tunnels and crevasses would be interesting, but not for long. The focus is on freestyle snowboarding, not dodging obstacles. It’s very pure in that sense.

This game does a nice job with just about every aspect it explores. It has a jaw-tightening edge to it, with jaded photographers heckling from the paparazzi section and obscure metal bands blazing away while you slice through the snow. For variety, players can switch characters, change their gear, try a new board — there are a lot of settings to adjust. Hence you get a feeling of depth and the urge to explore, and for the most part those urges are rewarded.

The music mixing is the hardest to resist. There are 150 songs to choose from, to put in just the right order, which gives the user a better feeling of control and ownership. If you don’t like what you see, you can rip your own tunes onto the console. Managing the soundtrack is like getting a free tutorial on moving music files from A: to B:. Tunes can be advanced, mixed, augmented, and varied. It’s a whole world on its own, especially if you’re driving some great big speakers in a dedicated entertainment system.

Think of it as a new chore for teenagers: Before you can spend the night at your friend’s house, you have to fix Mom a new soundtrack on the XBox with all of her Enya cuts. Beats walking 20 miles through the snow in bare feet just to get to school…

Music aside, the play is the thing, and the Amped learning curve is fairly gentle. What helps with the initial mastery is to simply swoosh down the hill, swerving left or right, but not crashing into anything or even trying a jump. It has a nice feel, a freedom, with the sound of the board slicing through the ice. The background has bright, stunning graphics pumped out of the nVidia chip with a pleasing depth of field. You can almost believe you’re there on the board. You don’t rack up points or impress the press, but you get the feel of the controls, certainly the most intimidating piece to this puzzle. It just plain feels cool, even if it has nothing to do with beating the game.

To play the game requires mastering increasingly complicated tricks. The difficulty comes in mastering all the buttons, but if you start slowly and conquer each move one by one, you can increase your satisfaction every time you play. For example, you can just practice jumps and ignore grinding on rails for later. Once you’ve landed something impressive off a lodge roof, you’ll be ready for more serious board work.

To keep the rewards coming, the game lets you build a career and ratchet up the standings to No. 1. All of the competitions add up and eventually you become the champion. Naturally, it’s not as simple as it sounds, but the premise is fairly basic, even if it is very difficult. Yeah, it takes awhile, but it keeps the game going for a long time.

Alternately, multiplayer is very well constructed. You can set up matches for highest score, best trick, no falls, etc. You can set up different tournaments.

Either way, to win requires an immersive commitment: you’ve going to have to know something about snowboarding. You may even have to spend some time learning the language of this small tribal offshoot, because there is a big vocabulary lesson in store for newcomers. WARNING: The older you are, the more prone to ridicule you become if you attempt to use these words in public.

It’s interesting to wonder where the snowboarding niche could go beyond what’s here. To rise to another level you’d probably need to introduce combat — maybe instead of dodging the fans, you could really go after them. Nah, too pointless. Or perhaps place enemies at various stations on the slope, whose job is to stop you from getting by? Seems like a job for a snowmobile. Maybe Rollerball meets Downhill Racer, or full-contact shredding? Hard to say. It sure is tempting to glide down the hill and just plow over all the journalists. You don’t get points, but nobody seems to mind. Just try to spare the reviewers, ok?