When I first got my PS2 I remembered reading an old Gamepro magazine giving me reviews for some of the best launch titles to come out with this system. One of ones it mentioned was a snowboarding title called SSX. I used to be a fan of Coolboarders on the PSX so I figured that might be a good starting game. But alas, I couldn't ever seem to locate a copy of it at time of purchase so I settled on another great game in Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore (I still have no fucking clue why project epsilon was a failure, or what it is). Some time had passed and a game called SSX Tricky came out which was essentially an expansion but with much more polished and entertaining characters (and voiced by some big name actors for the time) but what made the game great was the over the top gravity and logic defying special tricks the characters could perform. I got my hands on a copy of this one, and this is where the addiction began. After a strong followup with SSX 3 I dropped off with this franchise and after a lack luster following releases, the game faded away. But now it makes its grand return from a 5 year absence on the next gen consoles in....
SSX:(PS3)
So its a few years out of the SSX tour and Zoe, Mac, and the rest of the SSX crew have formed a team with a vow to conquer the 9 deadliest mountains in the world. But one of their teammates, the wealthy Griff Simmons, has broken off of the team and decided to do it all himself and taking his massive amount of funding with him. So to try to outdo him and complete the descents first, they are "streaming" all their attempts live to raise funding. Its a race to conquer the mountains first.
And sadly, that is pretty much the extent of the story line for this SSX game. You start off the game playing as Zoe, who's basically the captain of the SSX team. For each location you travel to, Zoe goes on a 1 on1 trip down the mountain in either a race or trick course. When you complete it, it gives you a small vignette about what they have done after the SSX competitions of old. Its done in comic book format but is done with basically a generic rock soundtrack in the back, no voices though. It is kinda nice to go back and see what became of some of the characters, but much like SSX 3 and the subsequent releases after, it comes of as very lacking. In SSX Tricky the game contained elaborate back stories for every single character. Every character had a mock interview where you learned more about all the very different characters. All of them were voiced by a notable actor or musician. They all had different mannerisms that made them interesting and notable. At the beginning of each event if they were racing with a friend they would banter with them and be encouraging, if they were up against a rival they would trash each other. All these little aspects add interest to the game and allow you to develop a story in your head. For me, I liked this system much better than what is in this new SSX.
The presentation is alright I suppose. The menus are pretty boring. You click around some text menus as a globe shows you all the mountain locations all around the world and shows you the general path of the tracks. you pick from 9 tracks and have to complete a character race and then a group race and trick course on a half slope then a full slope. Once you complete those you tackle your deadly decent. There is pertinaciously nothing special or interesting about it. Perhaps I am looking through rose tinted glasses but again, going back to SSX Tricky, I remembered there being cool animation transitions between the menus and different character reactions and dialog when you picked the, its just a subtle thing but it was at least entertaining. This one I just have to listen to the same crappy techno song as I feed through the menus...
Ugh... The soundtrack in this game is just terrible. All of the previous soundtracks had a cool mix of rock, punk, rap, techno and dance. While DJ whoever in every game is kind of annoying but it had a handful of tracks I enjoyed like Yellowcard's "Way Away" or NERD's "Rockstar". This game is just overloaded with droning heavy base techno and fucking dubstep. Just a nonstop barrage of wubs and bass drops. I understand that there are new genre's of music and perhaps some of them tend to lead more to the tastes of people who actually snowboard but for fucks sake, a little variety would have been nice. Give me some things that sound drastically different or at least try to at least make the stuff sound a little different. I usually can only make it about 15 minutes before I cave in and play a cd instead. If Skrillex's track comes up before then then that 15 minutes is drastically shortened. To the games credit I can add my own music or turn off songs I hate, but its just adding steps that keep me from playing the game.
You need and online pass to do any of the online features in this game, but I don't know why. the game has no multiplayer, but it does track your friends times and scores so you can try to beat them and earn additional experience and money when you do, but really EA? You are gonna charge people who get it used an additional 10 bucks for this privileged? Screw you.
The graphics are about what I would expect out of a snowboarding game. All the tracks are as open as a mountain will let you be and you are not overly penalized if you want to try different paths down the mountain. There are occasional pitfalls but otherwise all the mountains have their own unique design to them depending on what course you are doing. Alaska has the tendency of avalanches, the Rockies are a heavily wooded area, the African mountains are naturally less snowy. each of them have their own weather effects and the animations throughout the game are smooth with no signs of frame rate slowing down.
They did change the controls a bit from the previous ones. Instead of the boost being on the face buttons and the grabs being on the shoulders, they have been inverted for this game. It make more sense to keep the grabs by the thumb where gamers are have been conditioning their skills, but if you are an SSX veteran you'll find yourself going up there to grab and hitting more buttons than you need to and probably messing up your trick in the process.. Its not particularly frustrating and never is bad enough to make me stop playing it. They also added a rewind button for a small point penalty. You can do it a few times a race, to undo a mistake but it doesn't rewind the other boarders so be careful with its usage.
The last change is for each mountain you play a different character, each character has a unique ability or gadget that they need to make it down their deadly descent. Elise's course has a lot of long gaps so she uses a wingsuit to glide the distance to make them. Kaori is on a high summit with thin air, so you have to occasionally have to take a few breaths so the screen doesn't black out on you. When in the open explore mode you can give all the characters all the items so you can use your favorite to take all the descents with all the characters you like. Most of the tracks are pretty easy to get down but when hit the deadly descent the difficulty really spikes up. And boy does it, take a look at my video below for proof. Aside from those small changes the game feels a lot like SSX 3.
I really fell right into the routine of gliding down the mountain and hitting big tricks to get the boost up. In the explore mode I would see another person on my friend list with a faster time and obsessively play the same course over and over trying to edge my time just a few seconds faster than him. Some of the descents are pretty fun and found myself looking to play them again after I beat them. I feel that this game is just going to be one of those titles that suffer from Silent Hill 2 syndrome in that they hit the game really well on the mark once and they have been trying to replicate its greatness since. The game is not at all bad and I really had fun with it as I played. Its definitely a good little time sink and I'm sure when I run out of new titles to play I will come out to this one. If you are new to the SSX franchise than this would be a pretty good entry to the series but for the long time fans of the game they will probably find themselves feeling nostalgic for the SSX's of old instead. It was fun to come back to this franchise and I had fun with it for the time I was playing it, I just don't know if will have the same level of success that their previous games had especially going up against all the other triple A stuff coming out this month. I would give the game a recommendation, but maybe not for 60 bucks.
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| I'd only sponsor Mac if the video is him boarding right into a wall at 70. |
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| Elise is a bit less of a twat and more of a team player this time around. Probably because Lucy Liu is no longer her voice actress. |
Ugh... The soundtrack in this game is just terrible. All of the previous soundtracks had a cool mix of rock, punk, rap, techno and dance. While DJ whoever in every game is kind of annoying but it had a handful of tracks I enjoyed like Yellowcard's "Way Away" or NERD's "Rockstar". This game is just overloaded with droning heavy base techno and fucking dubstep. Just a nonstop barrage of wubs and bass drops. I understand that there are new genre's of music and perhaps some of them tend to lead more to the tastes of people who actually snowboard but for fucks sake, a little variety would have been nice. Give me some things that sound drastically different or at least try to at least make the stuff sound a little different. I usually can only make it about 15 minutes before I cave in and play a cd instead. If Skrillex's track comes up before then then that 15 minutes is drastically shortened. To the games credit I can add my own music or turn off songs I hate, but its just adding steps that keep me from playing the game.
You need and online pass to do any of the online features in this game, but I don't know why. the game has no multiplayer, but it does track your friends times and scores so you can try to beat them and earn additional experience and money when you do, but really EA? You are gonna charge people who get it used an additional 10 bucks for this privileged? Screw you.
The graphics are about what I would expect out of a snowboarding game. All the tracks are as open as a mountain will let you be and you are not overly penalized if you want to try different paths down the mountain. There are occasional pitfalls but otherwise all the mountains have their own unique design to them depending on what course you are doing. Alaska has the tendency of avalanches, the Rockies are a heavily wooded area, the African mountains are naturally less snowy. each of them have their own weather effects and the animations throughout the game are smooth with no signs of frame rate slowing down.
They did change the controls a bit from the previous ones. Instead of the boost being on the face buttons and the grabs being on the shoulders, they have been inverted for this game. It make more sense to keep the grabs by the thumb where gamers are have been conditioning their skills, but if you are an SSX veteran you'll find yourself going up there to grab and hitting more buttons than you need to and probably messing up your trick in the process.. Its not particularly frustrating and never is bad enough to make me stop playing it. They also added a rewind button for a small point penalty. You can do it a few times a race, to undo a mistake but it doesn't rewind the other boarders so be careful with its usage.
The last change is for each mountain you play a different character, each character has a unique ability or gadget that they need to make it down their deadly descent. Elise's course has a lot of long gaps so she uses a wingsuit to glide the distance to make them. Kaori is on a high summit with thin air, so you have to occasionally have to take a few breaths so the screen doesn't black out on you. When in the open explore mode you can give all the characters all the items so you can use your favorite to take all the descents with all the characters you like. Most of the tracks are pretty easy to get down but when hit the deadly descent the difficulty really spikes up. And boy does it, take a look at my video below for proof. Aside from those small changes the game feels a lot like SSX 3.
I really fell right into the routine of gliding down the mountain and hitting big tricks to get the boost up. In the explore mode I would see another person on my friend list with a faster time and obsessively play the same course over and over trying to edge my time just a few seconds faster than him. Some of the descents are pretty fun and found myself looking to play them again after I beat them. I feel that this game is just going to be one of those titles that suffer from Silent Hill 2 syndrome in that they hit the game really well on the mark once and they have been trying to replicate its greatness since. The game is not at all bad and I really had fun with it as I played. Its definitely a good little time sink and I'm sure when I run out of new titles to play I will come out to this one. If you are new to the SSX franchise than this would be a pretty good entry to the series but for the long time fans of the game they will probably find themselves feeling nostalgic for the SSX's of old instead. It was fun to come back to this franchise and I had fun with it for the time I was playing it, I just don't know if will have the same level of success that their previous games had especially going up against all the other triple A stuff coming out this month. I would give the game a recommendation, but maybe not for 60 bucks.
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