SSX

by Electronic Arts

• Players will drop into nine of the most iconic mountains ranges and regions on planet earth and each of these iconic mountain ranges have then been exaggerated to deliver a gameplay experience that is true to SSX.
• SSX introduces arevolutionary physics engine that will allow players to ride and trick off almost anything in theenvironment
• From boards of varying speeds to wing suits that let you glide for longerdistances, upgrade your gear to ride faster, trick higher and survive longer
• Characters include: Elise, Mac, Kaori, Psymon,Moby, Zoe, Griff, Ty, Tane and Alex.
• Defying the laws of reality, SSX will enable players to pull off tricks that would make even theworld?s greatest snowboarders cringe.

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B003O6C9LK
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches ; 2.4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: February 28, 2012
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,605 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #27 in Video Games > Xbox 360 > Games > Sports

Product Description

Platform: Xbox 360

Amazon.com

SSX is a snowboarding game for Next-Gen game consoles that continues the over-the-top Arcade style fun that the long-running SSX franchise is famous for. The game features racing and trick gameplay both in single player and multiplayer options, with runs set across the mountains of the world using real-world NASA topographical data. Additional features include: new and returning franchise favorite characters, global events and the ability to race against ghost images representing a friend's time on a run, real-world conditions like avalanches, rockslides and freezing temperatures, and more.

Over-the-top Arcade style snowboarding comes to Next-Gen consoles.
View larger.

Legendary racers and all new snowboard icons.
View larger.

Iconic Snowboard Racing Returns

A modern-day reinvention of one of the most critically acclaimed franchises of the last generation, SSX returns packing adrenaline and reality-defying gameplay into every moment. In this over-the-top snowboarding extravaganza players jump into the boots of your favorite SSX character -- including those featured in previous releases in the franchise -- and race, trick, and survive the world's most iconic mountain ranges. Based on real-world NASA topographical data, each mountain range delivers an experience true to the franchise's rich history, allowing you to defy reality and own the planet.

Gameplay

Along with racing and trick performance gameplay in which you pull off runs and sick jumps to build point multipliers and earn in-game currency, SSX includes the ability to explore the gameworld with minimal barriers as to where you can go. Additionally the game contains multiplayer options including the ability to compete in live events against real people in real-time on every drop in the game or to race against the posted times of friends in which ghosts of your friends' runs are visible in your world showing you exactly how they performed. Improve on these runs and earn in-game cash and if your ghost beats opponents reap additional benefits the next time you sign in.

Key Game Features

• Conquer the Planet - From the Alps to the Andes, the Himalayas to the Rockies, ride some of the most iconic mountains in the world. Developed using real-world NASA topographical data and SSX's own proprietary Mountain Man tool, every region delivers an exaggerated gameplay experience that is true to the rich history of the franchise.
• Race It - SSX goes way beyond your typical racing experience. With wide-open terrain, multiple elevations and starting points, and no invisible walls, it's up to your skills and imagination to discover the fastest line down the mountain.
• Trick It - Defy the laws of gravity by pulling off tricks that would make even the world's greatest snowboarders cringe. Nevermind a 1260° Double McTwist - in SSX, you're still a beginner if you still have both feet strapped to the board while spinning 200 feet in the air.
• Survive It - Escape avalanches, rock slides, freezing cold temperatures, and more as you take Mother Nature head-on in hope of surviving some of the most treacherous descents on earth.
• Explore - Explore every drop in the massive world of SSX. Set your fastest time on Race Drops, post your highest score in Trick Drops, and descend as far down the mountain as you can in Survival Drops. Instead of a traditional leaderboard showing friends' times to beat, ghosts of your friends' runs are visible in your world showing you exactly how they performed. Challenge your friends' ghosts or let your ghost chalk up wins and losses as you dominate your way to the top of your friend leaderboards.
• Global Events - Compete at every drop point in the SSX universe. Compete in live events against real people in real-time on every drop in the game. An event can last for a single run, hours, or even days and can support up to 100,000 participants, with your friends and closest competitors phasing in and out of your immediate surroundings at all times. Post a time and move up or down the leaderboard even if you quit out and turn off your console.
• RiderNet - Inspired by the incredible Autolog engine that powered NFSHP, RiderNet will guide you through the incredible world of SSX by allowing you to 'like' your favorite drops, recommending new drops and friends, guiding you to where your friends are, or drops that their ghosts are dominating, and directing you to the biggest and best global events for your level.
• Legendary Characters and All-new Icons - Favorite fan-selected characters, including Elise, Kaori and Mac make their return, joining new faces on the slopes.
• Every Moment is a Rush - A revolutionary physics engine pushes the boundaries and defies the laws of reality, allowing you to ride and trick off anything, unrestricted by invisible walls and barriers.

Additional Screenshots

Defy gravity in Trick play. View larger.

Chase the times of friends. View larger.

Race in global events. View larger.

Survive treacherous conditions. View larger.

Product Description

A modern day reinvention of one of the most critically acclaimed arcade franchises of all-time, EA SPORTS SSX will allow players to experience the franchise's signature fun and adrenaline-packed gameplay across iconic mountain ranges all over the world.

Utilizing NASA topographical satellite data, we've mapped out a Massive World for players to explore. Using a Google-Earth inspired interface, navigate throughout nine expansive mountain ranges and regions, each with multiple peaks and multiple drops. SSX packs reality-defying gameplay into every run letting players Race, Trick, and Survive down huge open mountains. In addition, Explore, Global Events and RiderNet - SSX's recommendation engine - headline an online feature set that will revolutionize social competition for gamers, making it fun and easy to compete with friends on your schedule.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Close but lacking the flare SSX Tricky and SSX 3 possessed March 9, 2012

By S. Schmidt

Platform for Display:Xbox 360

Fun: 3.0 out of 5 stars   

This is a fun game as far as a pure snowboarding, single-player experience is concerned, but unfortunately there are a number of things that are lacking in this title that leave the game falling short of my expectations. If you have an affinity for the previous SSX releases you may be disapppointed as a lot of what made the previous releases great is absent here. Also, if you are looking for a solid multiplayer experience you may want to look elsewhere.

EA has taken a more serious approach to this game. Originally the game was going to be called SSX Deadly Decents, and after negative consumer feedback with regards to the new serious direction taken in the revamped IP they decided to remove Deadly Decents from the title and just call it SSX. However, it doesn't appear that they made any attempt to alter the original game they programmed based on this consumer feedback. It is a shame because I feel like EA completely ignored the feedback from their fan base and said we are giving you the game we made whether you like it or not. So the game ends up feeling less like an SSX game and more like a survival snowboarding game. That aside, if you are new to the franchise you may not have the nostalgia associated with previous iterations of the game and find the snowboarding gameplay fun in its own right. They have tried to add a little bit of a story to the game through some comic book pages in between mountains, but it is superficial at best.

The basic premise of the game is that you are traveling around the globe to recruit members to your SSX team. Each member is specialized to handle one of the unique challenges each of the 9 mountain ranges presents. Each mountain range starts with you competing in a few race and tricky events and finishes with you taking on a deadly descent. You can think of each mountain range having one peak that is a boss battle - the deadly descent survival final stage. So for one mountain range the deadly descent may be darkness, another avalanches, etc., with specialized gear being required to handle each unique challenge presented. These mountain boss battles or survival runs include whiteouts (use special goggles for terrain mapping), darkness (headlamp), drop offs (requires a wingsuit to glide over crevices), ice (ice picks to improve turning ability), extreme cold (solar panel for heat), thin air (oxygen tank), rocks (armor), avalanches, and trees.

Some of the game highlights and drawbacks are outlined below:

PROS:
-The controls are tight making it easy to carve up the mountain and perform stunts.
-Athough pretty limited, the soundtrack is decent. I do wish there was a little more variety provided in the music included.
-The landscapes are large and beautiful with some pretty long runs down the mountain.
-There are a number of game modes (racing, trick events, survival events) and a larger number of locations/trails to decend than I expected.
-The ability to purchase a number of upgrades to each snowboarder is a plus.
-Several welcome nuances have been added to the gameplay on the various mountains that require specialized gear to survive descents like headlamps, wing suits, armor, ice picks, and solar panels. These subtle changes to gameplay help keep the game interesting.
-A GEOTAG system has been added that basically allows you and other players to hide markers on the various slopes. The player who dropped the GEOTAG collects money at a certain rate until the marker is discovered and other players that find the marker get money for locating the marker. It can be fun trying to find the perfect spot to hide a marker and trying to figure out how to reach those hard to reach GEOTAGS you see glimmering in the distance.
-I do think the survival aspects added to the game are a welcome addition, but I wish more emphasis was placed on the SSX brand and less on the deadly descent aspects.

CONS:
-The over the top personalities of the characters developed in earlier iterations of this game are non-existent so you really don't develop an attachment to any of the characters. Also, even though you can change the color of of your character's snowsuit, there doesn't appear to be any unique alternative character models like in previous SSX games. The base character models have changed for some of the characters making them not really feel like the same character you use to know.
-The lack of real live head to head competition really hurts the game. Beating the ghost of a friend just isn't the same as racing or tricking right next to them. Although the GEOTAG system is a fun little add-on, multiplayer feels very underdeveloped and tacked on.
-Although there are unique aspects to the mountains in terms of terrain (ice versus rock versus forrest), the differences are subtle. There was a real distinction in various locations in the previous SSX games that is lacking here.

In the past few days a problem has risen in my ability to connect to Ridernet ( the online aspect of the game). This is an issue other gamers are also having. While it isn't affecting every user, it is affecting both 360 and PS3 versions of the game. I have contacted EA about the problem, but they have yet to get back to me. Given this latest turn of events I cannot recommend that anyone buy this game until the issue is resolved. Also, given the lackluster multiplayer I would also wait until the price drops before picking this title up. I was enjoying the game for what it was worth up to the point where my technical issue developed but I admit that I am left partially disappointed by the neutering of the personality associated with SSX tricky.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars MAJOR Disappointment! March 21, 2012

By Astral

Platform for Display:Xbox 360

Fun: 1.0 out of 5 stars   

What a let down. A return to form? I think not... SSX 3 and SSX Tricky were two great snowboarding games for many reasons. The customization allowed you to give your character a little style. The music was fun and upbeat. The courses were optimized for gameplay and were lit up like an amusement park. There were all sorts of shortcuts to find and little surprises along the way that kept the game interesting. No two runs were the same. The game had a "flow" to it that felt great once you got into a cool trick string. Grab some friends, because there was co-op, and not just online play either... SSX has none of these things. NONE of them.

Gone is the co-op. If you want to "compete" against friends, they need their own copy of the game, game console, and internet connection. There's no racing each other, just the illusion of co-op, and definitely none of the shared couch kind which is what makes these competitive games so much fun. Customization? You can buy different boards, which are not all that different really. Forget about cutesy backpacks and other cool accessories. The suits are all the same patterns too, although you can buy color swap versions, and some that have a slight glow effect.... big deal.

The courses are patterned after various scans of real mountains around the world. This adds realism but takes away the fun. There's plenty of places where you can literally just fall to your dooming death, and sometimes are forced into it if you don't have prior knowledge of a run. There is a rewind option but it's useless as it only rewinds you (everyone else keeps going forward, making you hopelessly behind in a race) or else detracts from your score (which is harmful when you are tricking). Courses designed to be FUN (such as SSX Tricky or SSX 3) would have been welcome... they could have done a few of those and given both the ho-hum drab realism and the flashy joyful runs, but they didn't. The neon lights and extravagance of past games helped brighten up the monotony of snow, trees and rocks, which is all SSX has in abundance.

The game also never settles into that comfortable flow. The courses are too broken up and uneven to get that feeling, with jumps coming too close together or too far apart. Not to mention the giant chasms you can trick yourself right down into. There are a few secret little hideaways but nothing as we have seen in the past. The trick runs also seem to be way harder in comparision to races on the same mountain, making the difficulty curve spike and plummet insanely.

SSX is a decently built title... you can tell a lot of time went into it, and some thought was put in to figure out how to update this to modern consoles. However, the formula didn't really need updating, and that's the biggest mistake they made. Trading realism for fun, has made this a boring, monotonous disappointment. Which should not have been a surprise considering the past two installments - SSX On Tour and SSX Blur - neither which managed to get the franchise "feel" right. They were misteps, and this is yet another one. Definitely try before you buy.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A Disappointment . . . Its EA Sports I should have know better March 11, 2012

By Douglas A. Roemelt

Platform for Display:Xbox 360

Fun: 2.0 out of 5 stars   

I'm not going to give this the full blown soup to nuts review, but lets start with some shopping advice

1. Rent don't own

2. Its colorful and a few of the runs are quite fun (e.g. wing suit), but much of it is played 'in the dark' with no clue regarding the 'line'. Do you ski in the dark often? No. Why. Because its deadly. Maybe when I complete them all, I can play the different runs with a wing suit or a flash light and my review will improve

3. Does anyone at EA Sports actually talk to gamers ABOUT WHAT THEY'VE LIKED IN THE PAST, WANT TO SEE

4. Seriously, they could just remake 'Tricky' for the 360 and I'd buy it, probably like it more

5. I like the concept, six peaks, deadly challenges, and I like the mix of tricks and races, but the game has to many easy ways to die that the rider is simply 'forced' into

6. What made tricky great was (1) the ability to knock opposing riders down, (2) the ability to race someone else in the same room, (3) the happy music when you kicked into tricky mode, and (4) the interesting and often unexpected short-cuts, tunnels, suprizes.
This game has a few of these items but its not all that special.

Rent it for a weekend