Thanks to Wayforward for the review code

Title: Xtreme Sports
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 08/15/2023

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Story

In this Carbon Engine port of Wayforward’s other, non-Shantae original GBC title, you take control of either Fin or Guppi, as they set out to compete in fierce sporting events in an Xtreme Island contest! The plot here is pretty basic, but filled with lots of funny writing from the characters and character interactions with plenty of charm.

Presentation

Like with the prior port of GBC Shantae, and the Bill & Ted Gameboy Game from that compilation earlier this year, Xtreme Sports is given the emulation treatment via the Carbon Engine, with the menus and UI looking more like Shantae’s implementation than Bill & Ted. Upon booting Xtreme Sports, you’re greeted with the choice between playing the main attraction, an extra art gallery ala Shantae’s, only now with a cool 3D Cart render included, (though no manual scans, sadly), and the port credits.

When you get to opening the emulator options, you’ll find a similar menu to Shantae’s available with ZL + ZR, with the returning save state and LCD filter options. Carried over from Bill & Ted’s set are the extra borders and scaling options, which combine to make for a tremendous improvement over Shantae’s wonky pixel scaling that you couldn’t fix. Setting the filter to LCD and the screen size to Native 2X, I found Xtreme Sports to look incredibly sharp on my Switch Lite, and I was pleasantly surprised by the filter improvements.

The core game also is quite the looker, with the typical smooth sprite animation and expressive characters that you’ve come to expect from Wayforward, and even in a 22-year old form, these animations are absolutely excellent for a GBC title, showing a glimpse of what the developer would later get better at with Shantae. Unfortunately, the music, while incredibly catchy, doesn’t live up to the same levels of greatness as Virt’s score for Shantae, having been done by a different set of composers here. The OST is still memorable, but incredibly simple.

Gameplay

Xtreme Sports is a sports title presented in an RPG-like format. You take control of one of two main characters, and head out around the island to collect medals from the other contestants by beating their challenges in a variety of sports. You do this by traversing an overworld map, and besides talking to the NPCs to challenge them you can even discover secret medals hidden all around the world by examining suspicious locations like bushes. This helps make the traversal sections pretty fun to explore, and also incentivizes unlocking further leagues to see what new parts of the island have in store.

Each sport is quite different from the others, and the stages change up depending on what league you reach on the island, with each league being blockaded by a judge wanting a certain amount of medals. There are quite a lot of them, and you don’t even have to fight the opponents in a set order; if you feel confident in beating someone who obtained all the flags and the highest score first, you can very well do so!

Speaking of the sports, being that they are the main focus of the game, it would be apt to describe them all, along with their pros and cons. First up is In-Line Skate, which is a platforming challenge tasking you to reach the end goal in the set time limit. Each stage has a variety of obstacles to dodge and move around, and you can even grind on rails and other parts of the levels to gain points. Using the shake powerups to spin around can also destroy said obstacles, which can help you when going against a time or point limit. There are also six flags scattered throughout the stages, which can also factor into certain challenges.

Next up is Skyboarding, which is my personal favorite. Jumping out of a plane, you make a rapid descent towards the landing pad, and in the meantime, you gotta dodge airborne birds, collect directional icons, and spin crazy combos to rack up points! The shakes and flags return here too, and the shakes come in real handy here as they’re the only means of defeating those pesky birds, which will erase all of your collected icons and prevent you from executing the combos needed to score points. The more icons you save and press in sequence, the higher the point bonus. Combine that with the need for a good landing, and you have a great formula for the most addicting of the sports!

Surfing is another fun one, with this just tasking you with riding the waves and holding a button and direction down when jumping to score points. You gotta make sure you land smoothly on the waves, or else you’ll wash out and gain nothing! Stars, shakes and flags are also scattered throughout the stages, and the stars here are another way of getting points, with shakes providing help with longer, faster tricks. This sport can be a bit tricky to control at first, but once you get the hang of things it’s another fun one to earn medals with.

Skateboarding is a classic, and here in Xtreme sports it controls rather similarly to In-Line Skating. Build up speed, do crazy tricks and land properly for points, while platforming your way to victory! Flags and shakes are scattered about per usual, and help with meeting the challenges. I personally prefer this to in-line due to the bigger focus on points.

Finally, there’s Street Ludge, a top-down racer where the main goal is to race down to the bottom of the stage while dodging hazards, going through gates and ramps for points and, you guessed it, getting flags and using shakes to help you in a pinch. It serves as an interesting perspective shift, but a rather fun one nevertheless that gives me vibes of an Arcade game.

With all of these sports and the many, many NPC challengers you’ll be facing in the main game mode, Xtreme Sports is a pretty fun game with a decent amount of challenge to it if you aim to get all the medals and clear the story mode. Not every challenge will be the same either, as while a lot will take place on the same track until you unlock more areas of the island, they all usually require different thresholds, with the evil gang leaders usually requiring full mastery of the course and sport to successfully defeat.

On the plus side, harder challenges usually nets you more medals, and you can even go to a practice mode and compete in any sport on any course, so there’s a lot of ways to improve your skills until you can overcome those challenges, too. The emulation here is pretty darn good and input latency wasn’t a problem I noticed here, which is especially helpful considering the precise nature of the skating minigames. The only real bug I noticed this time around, was that like in the prior Carbon ports, the display options don’t seem to persist after fully closing the game, requiring you to re-enable the borders, scaling and filters each time you play if you want to keep sticking with them.

Conclusion

Generally, I found Xtreme Sports to hold up remarkably well in the nine years since I last reviewed it on 3DS, and it still serves as a fun portable sports game, with a good variety of events, a fun RPG-like campaign, and a decent challenge that’ll keep you busy.

The emulation here being better than the prior GB Carbon titles is also appreciated, with better pixel scaling on display along with some decent extras to boot, showing that the Carbon Engine is slowly nudging ahead to working out as a competent emulator that serves a great purpose when used for bringing back obscurities like this. Honestly, the only big gripe here is the pricepoint being double of what Xtreme Sports was on 3DS, and while the game is still great fun, it definitely may come off as a bit steep in the age of Switch Online drops and retro compilations. Still, if you enjoyed the Wayforward style and wanted to try something that came out near their roots, this is a great game to do that with.

I give Xtreme Sports a 7 out of 10.