By Pentadact

This was the last leg of an epic press trip - I seem to be confining myself to very narrow slices of time, so I’m not including the rest of it. Just the bit after LA, Santa Monica and San Francisco, when what work needed to be done had been done on laptops in hotels, and Vivendi took a few of us snowboarding at Lake Tahoe. Previous segments of the trip had been courtesy of THQ and EA, and EA had at least two wintery-themed games they could have tied a snowboarding trip to, but it was nevertheless Vivendi who took us snowboarding. I guess the logo of one of their wholly owned subsidiaries is a snowy mountain.

The chairlifts that take you up to the top of a ski slope are just benches on pulleys, really, and at the top you have to slip off onto a small slope to get out of the way of the guys coming behind you, then turn around a bit and go down the slope proper. On skis that’s not too tricky, since your skis are facing the direction the seat is traveling in, but a snowboard is naturally perpendicular to it. This means you have to twist round in your seat to try and get your board to face forwards, without falling off the seat before you reach the mound you’re supposed to slide down, and failing on either count means either falling face-first into the snow or getting hit in the back of the head by a moving bench, the skiers on it, or both. I fell face-first in the snow, every time.

Snowboarding is amazing. It’s like surfing, only the perfect wave is a giant freaking mountain, a type of thing that is famous for being easy to find and not going anywhere once you have. It’s also terrifying. We noobs, Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson, PC Zone’s Martin Korda and PC Gamer’s I, brashly decided to give it a go before our lesson, which was a terrible idea that I regret, for some reason, not at all. Ellie and Martin fell over a lot, and I fell over very hard. A lot. One of the reason’s it’s amazing is that you’re moving extremely fast on your feet without any effort, but without advanced manoeveurs such as turning, every second for which you’re upright dramatically increases your speed, and every increase in speed dramatically increases the force with which your face will ultimately hit the snow. If you never pick up much speed it’s frustrating to be falling over so much, and if you do pick up speed it’s terrifying and amazingly painful. It is completely brilliant.

After our lesson, with a group of small kids, I’d mastered the heel-side turn - a key move that somehow enables you to travel in a zig-zag without enabling you to turn left. They call that zig-zag The Falling Leaf, like it’s a deadly martial art rather than just turning slightly, and it was basically all I did for three days. Once you’re good enough at the toe-side turn, you can turn the zig-zag into a continuous snaking S-shape, but that looks only marginally cooler and beyond that there really doesn’t seem to be anything more impressive you can do. The heel-side thing lets you do that skidding-to-a-stop-in-a-spectacular-spray-of-snow thing, and that’s basically as cool as it gets.

At one point, on observing my thirty-eighth face-first fall on dismounting the chair-lifts, the chair-lift guy, in a very serene and uniquely American way, said simply “You’re doing it exactly right, you just need to think it’s going to work.” That, of course, is vacuous sophistry lost on anyone with any critical thinking skills, but I tried it anyway, and it worked. From that moment on, every single chair-dismount was a beautiful textbook slide into a gentle curve that brought me neatly round to the start of the slope, and I never fell again. I actually had been doing the right thing every time, but without the necessary conviction.

The slopes are all at pretty much the top of the staggeringly, inconceivably vast mountains surrounding Lake Tahoe itself, which is of course vastly, inconceivably high in the first place. To get between the lake-level (civilisation) and the slopes-level (joy) you have to ride the Gondola - hereafter referred to as the thingy - which is a load of pods on a big metal rail that goes all the way up. I mention that it’s metal, and high up, because that makes it extremely dangerous to use in a storm, and it seems that storms are not at all uncommon. When they see a storm coming, they give everyone half an hour to get down, then they turn off the gondola. If you’re not down at that point, you have to ski or board down, and:

Snowboarding down a mountain away from a lightning storm sounds pretty awesome, but Vivendi PR and remarkably good snowboarder Rob Donald (now with Take Two, you won’t be at all interested to know) had to do it early on, and apparently most of your time is spent stomping through muddy slurry too wet to board over, and it takes several hours. When the half-hour warning was given towards the end of the second day, Games TM’s Matt O’Hanarahanarahan and I waited for Ellie and Martin to finish their current slope to make sure they got down okay. For a very long time, they didn’t. Then the guy manning the chairlift up to the top of that slope closed that, and they still weren’t in sight. We explained to him that our friends were still on the slope, and that they didn’t know the thingy was closing, and that they would probably come down a lot faster if they did, but he appeared to be monumentally stoned. He wasn’t sure if the guy at the top was still up there, and if he was whether he knew the thingy was closing, and if he did whether he knew anyone was still on the slope, and if he did what he would do about it.

After a brief, absurd and doomed attempt to persuade the stoner to go up there and let them know, Games TM’s Matt O’Hanarahanarahan and I diagnosed this as one of those rare times when it’s not funny to try and reason with someone who may well be seeing us both as hairless cats right now, and probably instead one of those times for heroics. We commanded - and I rarely command anyone who isn’t in an RTS at the time - the stoner to turn the lift back on, strapped one boot into our boards and rode up to board down and save the day, or at the very least a stormy few hours. An action film of this probably would have excluded the three minute ride up, during which there was little to do except swing our feet and talk about the day, but it wasn’t like we could snowboard up the slope, and the only way of making the lift-ride dramatic would have been to fight to the death on it, which - as proud as I’m sure we each our of our respective publications - hardly seemed called for. It might also, at this point, skip over the bit shortly after my immaculate textbook chair-dismount, when I fell flat on my face before reaching the start of the slope, and so indeed shall I.

We found them around halfway down, skidded to a halt and casually informed them of the situation. In fact we may have overdone the casual tone, because it suddenly didn’t seem clear from our demeanour quite the level of initiative, resolve and frankly style it had taken to deliver this message, but neither did there now seem to be a way of detailing or emphasising this without undermining the heroic image such an explaination would be attempting to paint. So we just took the Gondola down and drank a lot in our big stompy boots at the snowboarder’s bar at the bottom.

Tomorrow: creationism, Mrs Doubtfire and the film-making sisters.