Stoked Review: Boarding With The New Kid

Destineer Games is the last place I expected to find a good snowboarding game; EA – sure, Ubisoft – maybe, but not Destineer. No offense to the publishers, but their track record of games have pretty much been all over the place, from “Homie Rollerz,” to “WordJong,” and they don’t appear to have many extreme sports games under their belt. However, after spending quite some time with “Stoked” for the Xbox 360, it seems like they managed to put together a pretty solid title.

“Stoked” isn’t the next “SSX” (this writer’s King of the Hill when it comes to snowboarding games) but that’s because “Stoked” takes a more realistic approach to snowboarding, and does it in a different setting. This game takes you away from the crowds and the race tracks, and puts you in the back country where it’s pretty much just you, your board, some trees, and the helicopter that just dropped you off. You don’t have to worry about other people getting in your way too often, or having to make it to the bottom of the run in a certain amount of time – it’s open-ended and the mountain is yours. [Continue Reading]

Dev Box Interview: Destineer’s Director of Product Development Peter Anthony Chiodo

It usually takes a small army to create the video games that we play, and, most of the time, all of the focus gets put on the game itself, and not on the people that came together to make it. Our weekly Dev Box interview series takes a look at some of the unsung heroes that have committed their lives to entertaining all of us. This week we are letting Destineer’s Director of Product Development Peter Anthony Chiodo take a break from working on “Stoked” and give him a chance to get on the Dev Box and tell us a bit about himself, and what he thinks about the industry.

Name: Peter Anthony Chiodo (“Tony”)
Title: Director of Product Development (Destineer)
What do you do?: I coordinate the production and development of Destineer’s game releases. I work with all of our external development partners, review their technical and creative capabilities, and create development contracts for the games we want to develop. I also work with our license partners and present [to them] the types of game experiences we want to create off their properties. I have a team of Producers who I assign to our externally developed partners and I work with them throughout the development process to bring our games to market.
Most recent game worked on: The most recent game I worked on was “Stoked,” a freestyle snowboarding game on the Xbox 360. [Continue Reading]