This high-speed arcade racer revolutionizes snowboarding games by taking the sport and tricks of today onto the tracks of tomorrow, creating the ultimate evolution of action sport event. It's contact snowboard racing, boardercross-style, where speed, tricks and aggression are essential to staying one step ahead of the game. The game's concept is fairly simple...snowboard, do tricks, and get down the mountain first.

However, that was the concept for the first Cool Boarders game, and it got whupped by the snowboarding mini-game that was in Final Fantasy 7. After that point I had sort of become put-off by snowboarding games, and I was hesitant to try SSX at first.

While it may look difficult to pull off tricks at first, every trick in the game is done by either holding a direction and jumping, or by holding some combination of the shoulder buttons and jumping. It's not you're trying to pull off a reverse dragon punch while you're in midair to do board grabs. One thing I found kind of lacking were the characters.

I just kind of wish they were a bit better thought out, because most of them just end up looking the same. The only way you really start to tell them apart is their distinctive voices. I wish there were more than 8 riders total in the game as well. Music is done pretty well, with EA calling up their old stand-by for video game rap music, Razael. (I'm not sure on the spelling.) He did the opening theme and a couple tracks for NBA Live 1999.

Nothing really worth buying the soundtrack for, but it's good enough that it won't get annoying, which is, however, more than I can say for his announcing work. Tricks are the core of SSX. Board grabs occur while holding down various combinations of the controller's shoulder buttons (L1, R1, etc.) while flips and switches are executed by tapping / holding one of the eight directions on the d-pad (up, down, left, right and the diagonals). Combos can be formed by doing different board grabs and lead to a larger point total when you successfully land.


Recommended: Yes