SSX On Tour
October 22,2005 - Since its debut on the PS2, SSX has always taken the snowboarding genre by storm.  Nobody believed that 1080 Snowboarding on the Nintendo 64 would be outdone, but SSX brought a new life to the genre with its sense of speed and stunts that nobody thought was possible.  It was then followed up with SSX Tricky, a game that practically mirrored the original, but made it all the better with an extraordinary cast of characters with Hollywood stars lending their voices.  Even that wasn’t enough, so EA Sports Big made the game more stressful, yet realistic, by putting every course on one huge mountain.  Year after year, we’ve been seeing the game literally get cooler and cooler.  Now EA Sports Big is back with what looks to be their last entry to the series for the generation—SSX On Tour, and despite the lack of an online mode, this brand new style works out extremely well for the series and should bring the game a lot more fans.

When you first boot up the game, you’ll be greeted with all sorts of strange doodles.  While some might complain about the lack of color, others will go crazy about the new sense of style.  SSX 3 was all about the ice-cold mountain, and SSX Tricky before it was all about the hip, urban lifestyle of the ‘70’s.  SSX On Tour’s menus feature sloppy and strange things that would usually come from the mind of a rock star—well, we don’t know how a drooling mule would symbolize anything that resembles the rock star life, but that’s the entire vibe you’ll get with the game.

Perhaps the biggest reason why the SSX games are so great, other than the insane stunts and course design, is the fact that it’s so simple to play.  You move around the slopes with the left analog stick and you can make your rider leap with the main face button.  The longer you hold that button, the higher that rider will jump.  Along with that, holding the button will allow you to gain more speed, since you’re actually leaning towards the momentum.  If you see a nearby rail or fallen log, you can even jump onto obstacles those and perform grinds.  While grinding, you can play around with other buttons to perform all sorts of combos.  When you leap off big hills, cliffs, or jumps you can use the control pad to make certain turns in the air.  If you’re holding right or left, you’ll spin that direction, and if you hold up or down, you’ll flip that direction.  In addition to that, you can use the left and right shoulder buttons to perform tail and nose grabs respectively.  Combine all these to perform even more combos.

As you perform tricks, or knock over unsuspecting riders, your speed gauge will build up.  The more you build it up, the more boosts you can do with the left face button.  If you don’t want to boost, you can perform more stunts to build it up more until the green meter becomes yellow.  Once it’s yellow, you’ll have the ability to perform Monster tricks.  Monster tricks are the same as “Uber” tricks from the previous games, except now; you activate them by rotating the right analog stick.  If you just tilt the right analog stick, you’ll perform a big trick that isn’t necessarily a Monster trick, but they’ll still gain you a bunch of points.  Use all the tricks and perform all the combos whenever possible for a higher point total, and keep in mind that you can perform any kind of trick on rails too.  So it’s highly recommended that you just play around with all the buttons.  If you mess up or get stuck somewhere, you can press one of the shoulder buttons (R2 on the PS2, WHITE on the Xbox, Z on the GameCube, and R and Square on the PSP) to reset yourself and get back on track.  That way, if you make a mistake, you aren’t hopeless, and you’ll still have time discover all sorts of secrets since SSX features loads of different routes.

The majority of time you’ll spend playing alone will be in the On Tour mode.  Here you’ll be able to create your own rider.  You’ll determine all sorts of things like the rider’s gender, whether the rider is a snowboarder or a skier, what kind of attitude he or she has, how he or she will look, and the clothes your rider will wear.  Once that’s done, you’ll be ranked along with the rest of the riders in the world, and you’ll start out with an amateur ranking.  From here, it’s your job to work your way up from the amateur ranks to the professional ranks, all the way up to that #1 rock star.

In order to move up through the rankings, you’ll be asked to perform all sorts of objectives.  Some are as simple as just getting to the finish line and performing a few tricks, and others will become a lot more difficult as you move your way up.  A few of the other objectives include racing other riders and tricking them all out.  There are a lot of other crazy ones as well including an interesting one where you have to avoid touching the snow for an amount of time.  As you’re touching the snow, a timer will show up indicating how much longer you can be on the snow.  If that runs out, you’re done.  There’s even a minigame where you have to avoid being in the air, but our favorite minigame involves going through an entire course and pushing down as many kids as possible (definitely a page taken out of Burnout).

At various times in On Tour mode, you’ll be challenged to tricking contests and races against an SSX character.  Since you’ll only have about 4 default characters (plus the Mario characters if you have the GameCube version), this is your best chance to unlock them.  You’ll meet familiar faces from past SSX games like Psymon, and you’ll have unlimited chances to take the other characters out.  However, if you quit, it’ll be a while until you ever see them again, but those are the breaks.

Of course, with a better ranking, you’ll get some cool benefits.  At a certain point in this career mode, you’ll have the pleasure of being sponsored by a sporting company.  When this happens, the company will provide you with a new wardrobe piece, as well as matching certain amounts of money you’ll make while on the slopes.  Before that, the only way to make an honest buck was to find money emblems on the slopes.  When you get sponsored, those money emblems you find will eventually be multiplied with the interest you get from your sponsor.  With all this cash, you can go into various stores and change your wardrobe, your overall appearance, and buy some better boards and equipment to stay on top of your game.

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