It's Tricky! - The Games I've Played

Let's just get this started right, because there is one, and only one song that should be playing for the introduction of this thing -

Def rap star? DJ Hero? Nope, the one, the only SSX.

Now, I started playing the original SSX back on ps2 at a friend's house, then a roommate had SSX tricky while at college, and then this one came out for ps3 and all of the nostalgia came back and made me want to pick it up and play it through.

SSX at it's roots is a snow boarding game. You go down the mountain, do the tricks, get boost, and win. Cross the finish line first, get the most points, and it seems pretty vanilla, but the simplicity of SSX stops there, because you see . . . SSX likes to be a little crazy.

SSX has turned your snowboard into things that have quick releases for your feet. That means that your character can kick their feet off of the board and do stupid tricks that are boarderline skateboarding and motocross moves, but a little bit more out there.

The real stupidity is that if you go off a jump and do one of these tricks when you're not spinning or flipping, the move looks crazy, but possible. Then there's the fact that you can still make your character spin and flip like a top when doing these . Then while doing all of these things are going on, you're building up your 'tricky' meter. Once it's full, Run DMC pops their iconic vocals into whatever song you're going down hill to, and all sense of normality within tricks goes out the window.

Then there are the tracks themselves. Officially they're based off of mountains in the real world, but the programers took some very liberal alterations to those mountains making the wall of China pop out of random snowboarding areas and other shenanigans. In each area, they even try to make a little challenge. In one area it's so snowy you can't see two feet in front of you, another is super icy, and one you're stupid enough to go cave snowboarding in the pitch dark. Each requires something different from you, and makes the game that much more interesting to play.

Then there's the music. SSX comes with a great list of songs that all work great when flying down the mountain, but then there's the ability that allows you to import your own music so that you can snowboard down with songs like Come Fly With Me by Sinatra (seriously, it was on my playlist for SSX).

Jumping out of helicopters, flying off cliffs, grinding on rails, and everything else that is in this game is a risky business, so SSX throws you a Prince of Persia space time rewind, and if you bail off a cliff, or make a huge mistake at the end of a long combo, you hit the rewind button and try to fix it. It comes with a cost of during races everyone else keeps racing while you're playing with space time, and during trick events, it knocks down your points, but it keeps you from having to reload the stage a billion and a half times just because you can't manage to get that one jump right the first time.

As games go, this one was easy for me to 100% offline content. Then the online content came and I wanted to punch someone EA being EA tried their best to suck money out of every micro-transaction possible. If you buy the game used (like I did) you can't get any of the money that you win in races online unless you pay for an online pass. I owned the game, I won online competitions, but I couldn't get the reward for getting first place in world wide competitions (or at least in the winning top percentages) because I bought the game used and refused to pay for the online pass.

With the one minor blip from online formula from EA and how much they try to get a dollar for just about anything extra, I like this game. It's fun, it's simple, it's addictive, and it is so over the top that you have to love it. It doesn't take itself serious, but it's still difficult at times. You can do a sextupple back flip while doing a 3,600 degree turn during it (10 rotations) while kick flipping your board, and still have a hard time with the level. Just because you're good at tricks doesn't mean you're a good racer, but just because you can come in first, doesn't mean you'll win everything. It's a fun mix of levels, a fun mix of tricks, a fun mix of characters, this is the game that is casual but challenging, but just fun to play.

I very often forget about it when talking to people about games because it's 'just' a snowboarding game. It's just a fun little game, but that's the biggest thing about it, it's a mindless, fun, game.