Project Powder closed beta test… closes.

Project Powder, the online snowboarding sim, ended their closed beta test yesterday. They sent around a survey asking what we liked and didn’t like about the game.
My likes: The game is fast, furious and fun. It is extremely deep and values skill and fast thinking, something alien to MMOs that try to level the playing field for everyone. Some races where decided in the last 0.05 seconds. Yes, the last five hundredth of a second. You have to juggle the positions of nearby players, the tricks you need to line up, the course itself, how to position for any short cuts, a whether to bump that curve for some quick air and maybe a speed burst on landing, or to just hunker down and stay in the groove.
I had a bug with the license board, where you learn new tricks. Many selections would just blank out all the UI, and I would have to click around to find the GO button. But I couldn’t read the trick description and advice they would give.
The item shop was pretty cool. I didn’t like the fact that most of what I bought was *rented* and would return to the store after 7 or 30 days. These were items bought with money earned racing. I assume that gear bought with “SparkCash” would be permanent. If not, that would be an instant deal-breaker with me. While I support RMT as a business model, I won’t pay real money for items that will poof in a week.
I was also disappointed at the customizability of the characters. You had two guys and one girl character, with their own names (though your Spark ID floated above their heads). So races with a lot of people would have copies of copies of copies; it looked like a Cylon vacation getaway.
Levels got real grindy after five. That’s okay if the max level is something like 10. (And it might be).
All in all, I will definitely move on to the open beta. I did earn that CBT hoodie, after all. I like a game that requires skill, but that skill isn’t impossible to attain. Just playing the game is enough. The racing is EXTREMELY immersive and heart-poundingly fun. Display bugs and concerns about the permanence of cash-bought items are the only things that could forfeit its space on my hard drive. The excellence of PP even in CBT has gotten me to consider trying other Outspark games.

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