The New SSX Is Already Better Than The Last Two

I like SSX games so much that I know that the person who created the screenshot atop this story named it wrong. Someone at SSX publisher EA called our boarder here Koari. Her name is Kaori.

I know this because no video game took over my house quite the way SSX 3 did several years ago on the PlayStation 2. Since then, SSX has been the game by which to measure all others that might have a shot to appealing to me and my wife. I might have liked just a few other games better, but not many. And her? She liked this one best.

After SSX 3, however, came two not very good SSXs and then, later, apprehension when a new one was announced for January 2012. I finally played it last week and can tell you what I told my wife about it. It’s not going to be the old SSX, but we can like this one.

The new SSX looks more realistic than the PlayStation 2 game that I loved. The landscape is coloured more naturally and the runs down mountainsides involve slightly more believable land formations than those in the over-the-top SSX 3. But what we loved about SSX 3 was the ability to snowboard long runs full of jumps, tricks, with a defiance of gravity as fun as Super Mario’s. When I tried a Siberia course in the new SSX last week, running on non-final code at an showcase event for publisher EA, I got some of that grand, soaring scale. The run felt less crowded than SSX On Tour‘s obstacle-laden courses and was easier to zip through than the the Wii SSX‘s absurd gesture-controlled boarding was.