SSX

Occasionally, an event comes along in your life leaving you questioning something close. Perhaps yourself, the world at large, morals, the future, sexual preferences and so on; Maybe a 30th birthday, maybe the first time a hot cheerleader saunters past and you wonder how she is doing at school rather than what her cup size is. Those sort of things.

-

Well much to my surprise, EA's SSX reboot is just such i thing, it has left me divisive in my own mind, and indeed wondering about the state of games journalism as a whole. But lets not get ahead of ourselves, SSX is a 'great' game maybe a fantastic game. But it is definately NOT a 'snowboarding game'.

-

You see i was born of a generation consigned to the safety of 'indoors' as i was growing up they were slowly phasing out arcades and the home console market was booming. I was 11 when the Playstation came out and 16 when i graduated to PS2. Possibly the golden age of gaming, much as 80's cartoons were the heyday of the mainstream 2d animation, so the first two Playstation consoles were a golden age of gaming. In those early days everything was a lot more James Camerons - Aliens and a lot less James Camerons - AVATAR. Fresh new and exciting sure, but with substance not just gloss and tatt to entertain an ADD crowd.

-

This is hardly to say the first SSX was a sim, far from it, it was a fast paced action racer where a bunch of insane 'dudes' not forgetting the 'radical dudettes' raced and tricked their way down impossible mountain runs, pumping music and fantastical over the top lighting as far as you like. However i distinctly remember how to do the tricks, and indeed the names of those tricks. Stalefish, Stiffy, Tweaked melon, between Tony Hawks games and the SSX series this was the urban dictionary of my youth, and the button combinations that linked these was the Thesaurus.

-

Playing the rebooted SSX doesnt feel like this to me, it feels more like my haphazard attempts over time to play everything from street fighter to Marvel Versus Capcom, that is to say a flurry of directed, but hardly precise or thought out buttom mashing. I did in fact complete the entire world tour in one evening using a combination of hold RT+a (boost+jump), then roll my thumb randomly over the other face buttons. This was pretty much sufficient to win all trick events and generated boost enough to at least qualify in all the races.

-

This left me questioning how i play games, as a full on grown up with years of 'pulling stiffy's' under my belt, was i just so versed in beating the trick systems of these games that it was all too easy? Or do these kind of games necessitate such accessibility and grandeur that the only option is "press-buttons-make-shiny!"? This bothered me because although i am acutely aware (from the games extensive and quite brilliant rider Net challenge system) that i am not great at this game. Yet the game keeps telling me that i am, giving me gold medals for almost ever mash of a button, yum yum tasty hollow rewards. So am i even qualified to review it? What even goes on in a 17 year-olds head? I sure as hell don't know and most respected journalists in this field are older than me...food for thought.

-

So enough of my ranting i'm supposed to be reviewer-ma-bobbing this game and in order to do so we need to conform to at least some structure, congratulations if you are still reading. SSX is a snowboard based racer-cum-trick score attack game, its the usual fare of you trick to get boost and you boost because it looks good, but ultimately the race will be decided by whether or not you fall over in the last 300m or you barell insanely down a hill smashing buttons to get as high a score as possible. We have all i'm sure played these games before and if you haven't and are new to the SSX series, then you stopped reading ages ago. The game features courses spread right across the globe, peaks from Alaska all the way down to Antartica. There are 9 real world ranges in all, each with 3 mountains, each mountain has a number of 'drops' or starting points this equates to 153 total courses although many merge along the way. Each helicoptered start precedes some fantastical routes laden with grinds, jumps, improbable architecture, and much much more. You will be competing either in a score based 'trick' event or a speed based 'race' event, the third type is a 'survive' event otherwise known as a 'deadly descent', but we will look at those later.

-

The trick and race events are really the meat of the competitive game, through the world map with RiderNET EA have introduced the now commonplace 'Autolog-esque' online feature, where rather than have real time multiplayer, you and your friends are constantly fed updates on when and where (and by whom) your times and scores are being beaten, you are then challenged to retake those top spots and given in game credit incentives to do so. EA have also introduced a unique feature called geotagging, this allows you to place a 'tag' on a course that other riders must collect, the longer it goes uncollected the more cash you earn, to make this even more entertaining you can drop a tag while rewinding allowing you to carefully position tags in suicidal locations, though we suspect glitching one behind a rock on an impossibly steep slope will become commonplace. However this adds yet another layer to a fascinating real world competitive play model that will surely keep this game fresh for longer than most.

-

The single player 'campaign' in truth feels more like a tacked on concession to the offline or unpopular. Its a bro-dacious story of 'team ssx' (go teeeam) versus Griff, the sellout super pro who only believes in corporate sponsorship and money, man what a drag, yeah its that bad. You take on select courses from all the peaks in order to beat him at conquering the 9 deadly descents. Essentially this mode plays out like an extended tutorial for the game proper, you get introduced to all the mountains, all the gear and characters and importantly all the 'deadly things'!!!

-

Deadly things are everywhere in SSX, to some degree they are the core to the games structure, they come in the shape of pitch black tunnels that are navigated by headlamp, avalanches, tree strewn gullies and rocky crevasses that require armour, huge chasmous leaps that need a wing suit to traverse etc etc These amount to a neat challenge that add interest to non-world tour trick and race events, form the backbone boss-battle scenarios of the world tour, and constitute the competitive 'deadly descents' survival tracks.

-

On the whole these are about memorization as much as anything, whether you are in a whiteout, pitch dark or wondering where the next cliff edge is, after 20 or 30 retries you will make it down fairly smoothly. The games rewind feature for when things go bad is limited on these runs and once your dead....well you're back at the top of the mountain, big deal. This lack of consequence means that these become a rather monotonous rinse and repeat experience although when they go well they can be rather exhilarating. EA's inclusion of the ability to permanently disable restart confirmation too is a blessing here, a genius stroke, when you first go to "Restart run" from the pause menu (and you will, repeatedly) you are given the option to turn off confirmations, meaning you are only one button press from the restart, which is acceptably quick too, well done EA others take note please, if i press restart by pausing and pressing down and clicking A on restart then why are you asking if i'm sure? Im not a fucking child.

-

The game features an extensive shop system that doles out 'loot' based on your level. If you focus on one character you will have no trouble affording most top loot as you progress, however the online challenges will be a must to generate extra cash if you want to trick out all 10 riders, bear in mind if you buy second hand you will not have access to cash generated online unless you buy an additional Online Pass from the market place, its not crucial to the core experience but i think most would rather have it than be cut out of the feature.

-

Grphically SSX matches up to any 360 game, gorgeous runs and effects, easily the best looking snowboarding game to date, the snow behaves palpably, spraying and resisting like you imagine it should, the physics are commendably assisted with just a nudge here or there to keep you on a nice line or land you on that rail rather than kill you off. The soundtrack is a decent contemporary mix of licensed tunes although it can feel repetitive when you play the same run over and over. The character speak is typically annoying dude-speak that i'm sure appeals to all the teens, or at least that's what the thirty somethings who made it thinks appeals to them. Its a glossy and solid package which is exactly what you would expect from EA.

-

On the whole then SSX is a complete game package, entertaining and rewarding challenge based gameplay that very loosely resembles a sport that some people do, you could argue that gaming should be about doing the impossible as the possible is right outside your window, reality maybe doesn't pack enough punch these days and what passed for challenge in the past maybe isn't 'fun' enough any more. We dont want a sim where we can be some real guy doing some real thing, we want tiger woods with lightsaber clubs, Madden with crazy special moves that explode the heads of the opposition, and a cricket game where something actually happens! So ask yourself, do you stop that cheerleader in the street for a chat before realizing she is shallow, stupid, stuffs her bra and is only 15? Or do you walk on by, fire up the internet and stream the latest Cheerleader bus orgy 12? Because that's what SSX is and i love it!

-

9/10

-

A