Project Powder, the online snowboarding sim, ended their closed beta test yesterday. They sent around a survey asking what we liked and didn’t like about the game.

My likes: The game is fast, furious and fun. It is extremely deep and values skill and fast thinking, something alien to MMOs that try to level the playing field for everyone. Some races where decided in the last 0.05 seconds. Yes, the last five hundredth of a second. You have to juggle the positions of nearby players, the tricks you need to line up, the course itself, how to position for any short cuts, a whether to bump that curve for some quick air and maybe a speed burst on landing, or to just hunker down and stay in the groove.

I had a bug with the license board, where you learn new tricks. Many selections would just blank out all the UI, and I would have to click around to find the GO button. But I couldn’t read the trick description and advice they would give.

The item shop was pretty cool. I didn’t like the fact that most of what I bought was *rented* and would return to the store after 7 or 30 days. These were items bought with money earned racing. I assume that gear bought with “SparkCash” would be permanent. If not, that would be an instant deal-breaker with me. While I support RMT as a business model, I won’t pay real money for items that will poof in a week.

I was also disappointed at the customizability of the characters. You had two guys and one girl character, with their own names (though your Spark ID floated above their heads). So races with a lot of people would have copies of copies of copies; it looked like a Cylon vacation getaway.

Levels got real grindy after five. That’s okay if the max level is something like 10. (And it might be).

All in all, I will definitely move on to the open beta. I did earn that CBT hoodie, after all. I like a game that requires skill, but that skill isn’t impossible to attain. Just playing the game is enough. The racing is EXTREMELY immersive and heart-poundingly fun. Display bugs and concerns about the permanence of cash-bought items are the only things that could forfeit its space on my hard drive. The excellence of PP even in CBT has gotten me to consider trying other Outspark games.

I haven’t really looked at the stats for this blog since I started working at Massively. I took a peek and hey, there are still four to five hundred people coming by daily at almost ten thousand visitors in the month of June! Love you all!!!

It’s always fun to check out what people are searching for that brings them to this site. And buried in there was about half a dozen requests from people who want to know how to throw a snowball in Project Powder.

I had to ask, too! After being pelted by a hail of snowballs when I didn’t click “Ready” fast enough!

To throw a snowball in Project Powder:

Gather snow by left clicking on the snow near your feet and holding the mouse button down for awhile.

When you get enough snow piled up, lift the mouse button and you will form it into a ball and stand up.

Left click on another player to throw the snowball at them.

If someone hits you with a snowball while you are gathering snow or are looking around for a good target for your own snowball, you drop your snowball. If you MOVE, you drop your snowball.

Best thing to do: Make your snowball, find the person who bumped you off the last curve and won the race by 0.05 seconds, and land one in their face!

New outfit :) And halfway through level 6. Experience is slowing down, and it seems that only finishing in first place really moves the experience bar much. The only way forward is to start using level 2+ tricks, which confer an experience bonus. And the only way to do THAT is to complete the level 2 licenses, which require doing a fast series of tricks and reaching the end of the course in 36 seconds. I haven’t managed to earn any level 2 tricks. Usually I am just a second or two behind. I need more speed. And to get THAT — I need to craft enhancements.

I apologize for the lack of screenshots illustrating all this; Project Powder’s closed beta test isn’t open. So you’ll have to take me at my word that when you buy outfits, accessories, or new boards in the item shops, most of them will have one or more enhancement slots for things like Trick (red), Luck (purple), Turn (yellow), and Speed (blue?). Gems fit into the slots, and gems are crafted from the ores you occasionally get when you finish a race.

To turn ores into gems require a magic box, which you can buy at the (duh) magic shop.*

The better the box, the better the gem it can make. All boxes are good for one use only. All require three of the same kind of ore — one each of Flawless, Normal and Chipped ores. Find it in your inventory, place the ores in the correct slots, and press the “Magic” button. It spins for awhile and (hopefully) spits out a gem. The quality — and PHASE — of the finished gem determine the amount it will boost your stats. Unequip the gear with the slot that will take the gem, drag the gem on to it, et voila, you are turning tighter, going faster, getting more benefit from your tricks or — I don’t know what Luck does.

You can trade items and ores to other players by sending them as gifts. And you can remove enhancements with the “de-enhance” button in your inventory.

Enhancement gems (and level 2+ tricks) are the key to winning higher level races — and you will find yourself increasingly locked from the lower races as you level. Best thing to do is to save up your money and buy the best items with lots of slots. It’s the only way to shred.

* Okay, this is kind of off topic, but I’ll tell it anyway. My son and I went to Rhode Island last week to tour a college. Now, we live in New England, which is proud of its colonial heritage, so it wasn’t all that surprising that we passed a mall called The Shoppes at Blackstone Valley. The use of “Shoppes” supposed to make you imagine that instead of an air-conditioned, parking lot-choked temple to consumer plastic, that it is a small collection of hand-hewn, rustic village shops clustered together, with the kindly owners living in small apartments above them. But we’ll forgive them that. When we got into Warwick, we noticed that one store had decided to become even MORE authentic, and MORE colonial, by calling itself a “Cheese Shoppee”. Shop-ee. I have an idea for an even MORE authentic store. I’ll call it a “SHOPPPEEEE”. Be thinking you were back in Renaissance London with that.

Ground out level 5 doing team coin missions. Instead of racing, you see who can gather the most good coins while avoiding bad coins. When I got 5 and went to get my new licenses, the whole license board just hung the game. A GM was trying to get an event of some sort going, but the room kept being disconnected. So I went shopping, got some new pants, gloves, and some earmuffs, then tried out the one new license I was able to get in a few quick races.

It’s still quite buggy, but you’d expect that in a closed bera. We had to repatch twice tonight. Quick, arcade-y, multiplayer fun.

Anyway, look for me and my “!n00b ctb ftw” hoodie in open beta.