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Both of the ESPN winter-sports games we review here fall short of the gold. ESPN X Games Snowboarding 2002 offers solid, realistic tricks with good physics and great background tracks, yet it is hampered by irritating controller combos, depressingly flat and lackluster graphics, and a strange lack of the most important thing of all—a sense of speed. That said, the campaign mode, which lets you bring a new boarder along from newbie status, might appeal to die-hard snowboarders with many, many hours to kill.

ESPN International Winter Sports, on the other hand, is a badly outdated button masher. Though it's nice to see obscure sports such as curling and bobsledding in a game, marquee events such as skiing and snowboarding lack panache, and figure skating is a joke: With no direct control over the skater, you simply interject the big moves at a predetermined time by hitting a button when prompted.