SSX 3

"Crash, Boom, Bang: That's what 3 Stands for in this Title"

Holy freakin' cow. This game is amazing. The graphics are unbelievable, the mountain and its tracks are completely out of this world, and the tricks you can pull off are mind blowing. The catch? It's freakin' hard as hell. This is a seriously difficult game. In a way I don't mind, because simply riding down the mountain, enjoying the sights, and pulling off tricks is great fun. You can freeride and explore the mountain, snatch up collectibles, and ignore the challenges if you want. But an intense focus on completing the game's challenges and goals will have you feeling like you're trying to force your way through a concrete wall with your forehead. Prepare to meet failure time and time and time again. This game doesn't give anything up easily. It requires you to know your stuff to advance.

On the positive side, the mountain is absolutely freakin' enormous. Completely disregard anything you have heard in the past about something in a video game being enormous. This mountain redefines the term. It is just unbelievable how huge this thing is, and how many alternative pathways there are to reach the bottom. And it's all different: there are no two areas on the mountain that look like a repeat. Everything is gorgeous. This game has some of the most beautiful graphics I've ever seen. Sometimes you'll just stare in awe at the majesty laid out before you. The tracks or courses, whatever you want to call them, are more insane than I imagined they would be. You have to constantly be on your toes. Get lazy for one second and you'll find yourself eating snow or falling into an Off Limits area. The game offers no mercy to the player who isn't looking out for opportune rail grinds, sneaky short cuts, or chances for tricky big air.

Speaking of no mercy, the game is a bit too inaccessible for my liking. It is often so difficult that I feel like just a visitor who has no hope of ever really mastering the game. The developers obviously assumed that the player had played the first two games and was familiar with snowboarding terminology, such as the names for all the different types of tricks and how they are done. The game seems to be specifically engineered to knock you on your ass and make you fail at whatever you are trying to do. Some rails are set up to purposefully send you crashing into an obstacle when you come off them. Some parts of the third peak (the craziest and the most difficult) send you right into Off Limits areas, although the path leads you straight there. If I had a nickle for every time I wiped out in this game or went Off Limits, the game would have paid for itself by now and then some. Hell, I even wiped out just going into the Lodge once. I don't know if it's the overbearing difficulty or if there is a control issue at hand here as well. The control feels pretty good, but you'd be surprised how difficult it is to aim your rider at a specific spot. It's almost as if the game deliberately resists your attempts to hit certain jumps, rails, pathways, and collectibles. How many times did I feel assured I was lined up just right, and missed my target? More times than I would care to mention. Handplanting onto a rail is more difficult than it should be, and this is largely the fault of the camera. The camera has a very annoying tendency to swing around in front of your rider when you try to do a handplant, and this causes your rider to end up going in the wrong direction when he gets on the rail. This costs you valuable time and points in the challenges. And I swear the only way some rails can be hit is with a precision laser-guided targeting system. I don't know. Maybe the fact that I've been playing this game all day for three days straight because I'm home sick is making me nit-picky about it. It really is an impressive game, but it can be so frustrating.

Without a doubt the most frustrating part of the game is the challenges. These challenges are not easy folks. They're actually challenging . . .challenging to the point of being an annoying pain in the ass. Most challenges require such ridiculous precision and pre-knowledge of an area that completing them just isn't much fun. You'll restart over and over and over again. Or, they're set up in such a way to make you really pissed off, like the half-pipe challenges that require you to shatter several panes of glass that you CAN'T SEE. Or the Pop-The-Balloons challenges, in which balloons are positioned in places that are literally impossible to get to. How many times can a person restart a challenge before he loses all semblance of sanity? Just how bloody inaccessible can a game be before you stop having fun?

The game's navigation system for accessing the challenges is a bit of a mess, because the player has no way of knowing where challenge markers are on the mountain. The game may tell you that you've completed 21 of 40 challenges on a specific peak, but the player has no way of finding out which sections of the peak contain uncompleted challenges. So it's actually a challenge just finding all the challenge markers. You have to randomly pick a spot on the mountain in Freeride mode and go looking. Like I said, the game gives no quarter. It makes you work for everything you get. On a related note, the starting gates for the races and the slopestyle competitions are not marked for which race/competition they are. So you might be cruising down the mountain and see a starting gate, but you have no way to know if it's a race or competition you've already completed. Are we expected to know every inch of this enormous mountain and where every race and competition is? Sure, you can select a specific race or competition from the game menu and go there directly, but the game manual encourages the player to do a freeride down the peak before entering a race or competition to pull off tricks and build the trick meter up, so you can start off with an advantage. This simply isn't possible with the way things are set up, unless you want to enter events randomly and take the chance of it being an event you already have the gold medal for.

On the positive side, you can buy a crapload of stuff for your rider. And not just useful stuff. Besides all the attributes you can level up to improve your rider's skill, you can buy silly stuff like bunny ears, baseball caps, beanies, backpacks, and even special effects like a flaming board. I thought this was pretty cool. There is also a ton of special goodies you can buy like artwork, trading cards, and action figures. Yes, action figures. This is one of those games that laughs at that little thing called 100 % completion. You would have to spend countless hours and exercise some serious skill to reap all the rewards in this game. You have to at least play until you unlock Elise's low cut zip down top. Believe me, it's worth it. I've seen Elise wearing a bikini in gameplay movies on the internet, but for the life of me I haven't been able to unlock it yet.

The music in the game pretty much sucks, so you'll want to customize your own soundtrack by ripping tunes to your Xbox. I can't verify first-hand that this can be done, because I didn't do it, but the option is there in the audio menu when you go into the Lodge. I mean, not all the songs suck, but most of them do. I really wish the game had given the player the option to turn off the song tracks he doesn't like, like the Need for Speed games do. In other audio areas, the comments your rider makes as he/she flies down the mountain are pretty cool, and help set the mood. Elise gets really, really excited when she does well, and this acts as kind of a mini reward system for the player. It's great to hear her exclaim things like, "It's just unbelievable how good I am!" Likewise, Elise comes off with some funny remarks when she does poorly, such as, "Thank you, I'm here all week." The arcady sound effects are very cool, and really add to the game's over-the-top style. Some of these courses sound like they are living beasts, what with all the funky sound effects going on around you. A couple of different voices heavily laden with sound effects let you know where you are in regards to your trick/uber trick/super uber trick progression, which is a big help, because you don't have to be constantly glancing at your meter. Another thing I really liked about the audio was the simple sound of your board whacking the snow base after a long fall or jump. I've never snowboarded, but it seems to me that it sounds very authentic.

The only gripe I had about the trick system is that the player is only allowed to pull off four Uber Tricks before he progresses to the Super Uber Tricks. I really like the Uber Tricks, and I wish the game had offered some way for the player to remain in the Uber Trick state if he so chooses. It would have added another element of strategy for the player, because you don't always have enough air to pull off a Super Uber, especially as insane and unpredictable as this mountain is. With the way it's set up, if you don't have enough air for a Super Uber, you have to stick to basic grabs and spins/flips, which is boring. Why not give the player the ability to pull off simple Ubers until he can get enough air for a Super Uber? You've got two buttons on the controller with duplicated functions. One of them could have been assigned to switch back and forth between the Uber and Super Uber state. This might make some of those ridiculously impossible point challenges more accessible. This mountain is so nuts, it's simply not possible to always have maximum air for Super Ubers.

Overall, SSX 3 has a lot to offer, but it offers it begrudgingly. The game is too difficult to be enjoyed by the casual gamer. It was obviously set up for a loyal, devoted fan base who knows this stuff well. Less devoted players will have some fun with it for a while, and then take it back. It's one of the most gorgeous games you'll ever see, and it's worth your fifty bucks IF you've got the patience and determination to try to master it. But I would have to suggest a rental first just to make sure it's your cup of tea.

Final Rundown:

Graphics: 10

Sound effects: 10

Soundtrack: 5

Gameplay: 7 Lower score due to high difficulty level. This game hates you. It really does.

Control: 7 Most of the time, no problem, but it's too difficult to aim your rider at specific spots, and the camera can mess you up when handplanting. Tricks are easy to pull off, though.

Replayability: Doesn't apply here, because you will never finish this game. Ever. There's simply too much to unlock and it's just too damn hard.

Overall score: 7 Probably the best snowboarding game on the market, but with some flaws that bring the score down.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/07/05