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.

It looked like it might have been an MMO, and I wrote up a quick article thinking it *might* be, but Project Powder really isn’t. What it is, is a helluva fun online snowboarding sim with chat channels, guilds/clans/crews, levels, more tricks than you can handle, and an item shop.

Here’s a really terrible video I took from one of my first runs through the game. Yeah, I don’t win and I fall a lot, but I was still learning, and this video covers the entire action, from the snowball-throwing lobby to the finish line. For some reason, Fraps didn’t catch the hp-hop soundtrack, so I replaced it with selections from the .hack//sign sound track, Ayreon, and Phish. Sorry, no ear-killing death metal. I can feel your disappointment from here. Also contributing to the terribleness of this video is the fact that it is squashed horribly. This was widescreen, hi-def and looked fine on my PS3 when I uploaded it, folks.

And just to prove that yes, I CAN win:

Before you get out on the slopes, you need to learn how to play and how to do tricks. The excellent tutorial will get you used to moving around on the course (though their battle mode left me confused), and the license system feeds you a couple of tricks a time to learn as you level, so you’re not overwhelmed all at once, though when you see higher level people on the course busting moves and racking up points two or three times yours, well, you just want to get another level. You’ll soon learn to do little quick tricks when you find yourself in the air, and big, long elaborate ones to do while you’re plummeting off a cliff. In fact, you only really need those two moves, but you’ll want to mix them up.

Project Powder is at its core a racing game. Most of your time will be spent out on the slopes, racing. That’s the only way to get experience, and that’s the only way to earn money Sparkcash. You can *buy* money Sparkcash, of course, but that won’t get you as much as you think.

Most of the things you would want to buy, are only rented. A couple dozen races will land you a new outfit and a hot board, but you’re only renting them. After 7 days, or a month if you pay a bit more, your stuff goes back to the shop. No problem if you’re racing every day and always changing out your outfit anyway. but take a few days off and you’ll come back wearing nothing but your newbie clothes.

That’s kinda why it’s important to reach level 5 in closed beta. If you manage it (and it isn’t that hard; I was within easy reach of level 4 when they closed the servers last night), you get to earn a closed beta test hoodie that won’t go away after seven days.

You can also (for 50,000 points) buy whichever of the three closed beta characters you didn’t start with. These characters are yours permanently, and I fully imagine more will become available when the game goes live.

The lobby is a gentle snowfield on this snow-filled world you’ve discovered (in the game’s backstory, global warming has made snow vanish across the Earth). You can chat, you can discuss your clan (the clan I’m in: BDSM. ALWAYS ask about the name of a clan before you join.), you can talk about the gold farmers who will join the game and just sit near the starting line for the cash, you can throw snowballs (click on the snow to make a snowball, click on another player to hurl it at them).

Once everyone clicks READY, the room host (and, I suspect, the person whose computer is running the race, typical of lobby-based games) starts the race and you’re off.

Your experience gain is based upon your distance from last place. Last place finishers, or non-finishers, get very little experience. So if you’re shredding by yourself, you will take a long time to level. With two people, the second place finisher, no matter how good, will get nearly no experience points. Get four people in a game and just avoid being last, and you’re all set.

The racing is exhilarating. The animations are great, the characters — all three of them — are cute and expressive. The outfits and accessories you can buy to customize your character are very nice and very affordable, though having to keep buying them is an epic fail with me. If I work hard for an outfit only to see it evaporate after a week, I doubt I will bother buying it again, much less spend real money on it. Though if buying it with real money gets a permanent copy, well, then I just might do it. Not having put money into this game, I don’t know.

I could totally see an MMO or an anime based on snowboarding. Sadly, this isn’t it. Project Powder is a well-executed, free-to-play, lobby-based snowboarding sim, and why not? Sign up on their web page, and check out their other games, some of which really are MMOs. If they are anything up to the quality of Project Powder, they might be one of the few Asian imports worth playing.