Straight off the bat I am no SSX expert and am hoping better players will come forth with their own unique advice.

That being said I thought I'd make a thread for people who have not played SSX before.

Your most basic friend in SSX are wind-ups. Trivial for long time players but something that gave me great trouble when I was playing my first SSX game on PS2

Playing SSX for me has always been like guiding a rocket. When approaching jumps you want center yourself with your ramp and then start holding down your jump, boost and wind-up control (in the case of Stick controls it's the left analog) which might feel a little weird because you're effectively relinquishing steering controls.

This way you won't be flopping off all those ramps and barely getting any spin. You can wind up in all directions. Up/Down for flips and Left/Right for rotation.

When using stick controls it's good to keep a mental "clock" type memory of what tricks you're doing. I usually just go clockwise - first jump Right on the right-analog, second jump down, third left, fourth up etc - adding tweaks randomly.

An important part of getting high scores is keeping your trick combo going. Usually with a lot of launches and ramps this isn't a problem but sometimes there are longer stretches where you might lose your chain. In those situation you want to use Board Presses to quickly re-up your chain meter. With stick controls this has been mapped to the face buttons (I'm pretty sure in On Tour you had to hold the analog back like in skateboarding games) You want to always aim at doing one super long combo from the very start to the very finish of your run.

Almost always tweak your tricks. Simple spins should only be done at the beginning of a run when you want to do a few flatground hops to build your tricky meter.

I'm not sure if this is the case in the current SSX but usually diagnal spins give more points then simple left/right ones.

Trick events have no time limit so you should take your time going down. Sometimes you see the AI players ride ahead and might be tempted to catch up, but it doesn't matter if you arrive way behind them because it doesn't affect your score. Use board presses to take a breather and plan out your next move.

When riding rails you can still wind up - just take care to JUMP off before the rail ends.

A clever way of "cheating" scores in Trick Events in the past has been finding half pipes in the middle of the run and just staying in the pipe for a long time before continuing onwards to build up your meter. IF the grade isn't too steep you can use boost to steer yourself uphill a bit and keep riding the pipe.

Post your own tips and observations about the game!

Ooh, thanks for this! I'll be trying it out right now. Do you have any tips on getting better times? I have friends who seem to be going faster right out of the gate.

There is a "flow system" in the game that punishes you pretty harshly for slowing down or going backwards. If you're not always traveling down the hill, your combo multiplier will drop pretty quickly.

@Humanity You should alter your tips to reflect this.

I found that when doing flips, my score multiplier went up more dramatically when doing simple back/front flips or horizontal rotation, not when I did a combination of both. It seemed counter-intuitive to me that doing a straight-forward flip while performing a hold would build score better than a more impressive-looking helical spinning motion.
 
Realizing this put me from dead last to at least bronze-silver on trick events (against AI, of course, you guys murdered my score boards).
 
Is this right? Or am I doing something wrong?

There's one real minor thing that's specific to the trick course in the demo that I haven't been seeing any of the ghosts on my leaderboard doing as I slowly work my way past their scores. That big rock that's right in front of you when you start, you can ramp off it and be in tricky state before you even reach the first set of rails at the beginning of the course.

@psylah: Interesting. Will check it out later. Maybe you're just getting better ;)

@BootsRaingear: Thanks, did not know!

@Rmack Maybe someone else will have tips on Racing as I've never liked that event in SSX games and generally only did them when necessary.