You may not have heard of Shaun White. Although you might have heard of his father, Robert, who produced a famous lemonade back in the eighties. You remember, the stuff you had to drink secretly at night, presumably because being spotted quaffing it in broad daylight would be an embarrassing admission that you couldn't afford a decent brand of pop.

Silliness aside, Shaun is actually a pro snowboarder and this game is about taking to the powdered slopes and, well, showing off in a snowy blaze of high definition graphics. Standing atop a mountain and peering down, the landscapes look very impressive, with steep, stomach-turning slopes, vast crevasses and slick shiny rivers of ice stretching out beneath.

The structure of Shaun White Snowboarding is open-ended, and you can hop across the globe between four mountains in the States, Europe and Japan. Each area feels like a real ski resort, with mountain lodges, ski lifts, snow cannons, differently graded pistes and locations such as abandoned mine shafts to add some spice.

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Numerous challenge icons are dotted about these maps, clearly marked on your radar so they're easy to find. Each offers up an event to test your boarding skills, including the likes of freestyle (doing fancy tricks), big air (spend as much time airborne as possible), jib-fests (sliding along railings like a loony) and straight up races. Getting a certain score rewards the player with a medal, and once all the events in an area are beaten, a special final challenge is unlocked.

Your first challenge, mind you, is to fly off a few ramps and land on your board rather than your head. The snowboarding feels pretty authentic, with different types of snow that affect your speed, and even iced up terrain which is hard to steer on. However, once you've mastered a bit of simple timing it's fairly easy to pull off decent trick jumps and land them, so the game carries a realistic flavour yet still remains accessible to casual gamers.

Ubisoft has taken an interesting approach to the multiplayer, which in keeping with the open-ended philosophy of the game is integrated into the career mode. This means that if you're on Xbox Live, you can tackle the various boarding challenges alongside other players, which makes certain events a lot more enjoyable.

The death-race, for example, is marvellously entertaining, as you can shoulder barge and shove real human opponents out of the way as you slalom between gates, which is far more satisfying than AI drones. It also helps that the interface is slick when it comes to initiating these multiplayer challenges.

Only a couple of snags need to be mentioned concerning the online play. Firstly, the lag beast lobbed the odd malevolent snowball in the direction of our fun, as quite often we noticed the other players blinking in and out of existence and skipping about a bit. This can be off-putting, but the effect is usually so slight that it doesn't mess with the game's playability.

The second downside is that some events make players take turns in tackling a course, so you have to sit around watching the others. We didn't mind too much, as we picked up tips from observing the other players' tricks and style, but we'd imagine the less patient gamers out there will probably be board stiff (sorry).

Ubisoft's snowboarding outing is a satisfying affair with a diverse range of events scattered across its four lushly rendered, open-ended locations. It strikes a good balance between realism and playability, although it is slanted towards the more casual gamer, so hardcore joypad jocks might find it all too easy. Still, they can always get their kicks from humbling everyone else in the tidily integrated online play.