Throwing the baby out with the bathwater

A strange review title, for sure, but that's what EA have done with this latest SSX title.
I have to start this review with a simple checklist. If you fall into any of the following three categories, you're not going to like SSX On Tour:
(a) you've played SSX Tricky and/or SSX 3
(b) you are used to the controls of SSX Tricky and/or SSX 3
(c) you hate grunge metal music.

What is it?
If you've never played an SSX title before, this probably isn't the one to start with, not the one to form an opinion from. SSX is all about extreme snowboarding. And by extreme I mean impossible. It's about catching monster air (5 or 6 seconds or more), doing insane stunts, and hitting the ground from 60 metres up without shattering both legs. It's about snowboarding at impossibly fast speeds through ludicrous terrain filled with insane ramps, edges, snow mounds, ice tracks and rails. SSX is as far removed from a simulation of snowboarding as you can get. Instead the SSX franchise focusses on pick-up-and-go gameplay with rewarding visuals and music to go with stylish games.

What's new?
The first thing that will strike you about SSX On Tour is the interface. Gone are the slick, cool menus and navigation system from SSX Tricky and SSX3. Instead you're faced with what looks like a 10-year-old's doodles from a day at school; white background with scrawled drawings on it. It's truly hideous. It's also appalling to try to find your way around. Remember how easy it was in SSX3 to pick a mountain, then pick a track? Not in SSX On Tour. Nope - you'll be fumbling around for ages trying to find a slope to ski on. The problem is that the theme for SSX On Tour is grunge rock, which is a pretty niche musical market and as such, you either love it or hate it. There's no middle ground. If you're into stapling your eyelids shut and rivetting your nose to your lip, I'm sure this game will be right up your street. But for the regular gamer who enjoyed previous SSX titles, EA have cut us off completely.
Also new to the game are skis, for the first time. You can choose to tear up the slopes on a snowboard or skis now. There's not a lot of difference to the way they handle or the tricks other than the visual difference of seeing your player on two planks instead of one.
The tracks are all new, of course, and this time they're pretty difficult. The essence of SSX games is lunatic tricks, fast boarding and wide-open tracks filled with rails, jumps and trick opportunities. In SSXOT the setting is mostly upper-mountain, which means trees. Lots and lots of trees. Whilst it's impressive to see how many trees there are, it's also turned the courses from wide-open SSX courses to minefields of tree trunks. EA have lost a certain sense of SSX-ness about the game now. You can't really ever get up a good lick of speed any more, and for the most part, when you hit a good jump, you'll inevitably slam into a tree trunk on landing and lose all the trick points you'd built up in the air. Lower down the courses you'll find more urban settings but these too are less SSX-like than they should be, with lamp posts instead of trees, and tons of buildings and signs in the way. And here's the kicker - some of the signs and lamp posts can be broken by skiing over them, but others can't. There's no way to tell the two apart so you basically have to avoid all of them.
There are some new game modes in the career path. Gone are the BIG challenges, and in come predetermined shred challenges that you have to complete to forward your career. These include things like outrunning the ski patrol, grinding 'x' number of metres on rails before the time runs out, doing combo tricks for over 'x' points in a certain time and so on and so forth. These are all pretty fun modes of play and they're interspersed with SSX events where you race lots of other players for times and titles.
Also new to SSXOT is the presence of other skiers on the track at the same time, and for my sick sense of humour, this is one of the only redeeming features of this game. You can build up your boost bar by colliding with or knocking over other skiers. There's a wide gamut from pro skiers right down to little kids trying to snowplow. At one point you'll even come across a large toobin' track with kids in inner tubes sliding their way down the mountain.

What changed?
In previous SSX titles you could select a character and compete in the career mode with them. In SSXOT you build up your own character from scratch and use them instead. You'll come across some old favourites from other SSX titles as you compete, and if you beat them in certain events, they become available for you to use in the non-career mode. I don't like this - it means your favourite character can't be used in career mode.

That aside, career mode (once you figure out the map) is where you compete in events and make money. The more money you get, the better equipment you can buy, and here's another change. In previous SSX titles you could earn or buy rider attributes, like balance, turning, grinding skills etc. In SSXOT you can't - they're associated with different types of snowboard which you can buy. This is a subtle but unwelcome change because it means you'll get stuck with a predefined series of abilities based on the snowboard you're on.
There is another change which is that your character appears to be afflicted with the retarded virus in SSXOT. No matter how good the board is that you purchase, it just seems a lot harder to get the player characters to stop bouncing off things and falling over. You'll be spending a lot of time stabbing the "recover" button, and even this doesn't seem to function like it used to. The volume of trees doesn't help this at all because now, afflicted with the inability to balance, you can tumble, bounce, scrape and slide down a couple of hundred metres of course before you can get up again, hitting trees, posts, signs and buildings as you go.

The trick mode has changed too. It used to be that you built up boost by doing tricks, then you could do Tricky or Uber tricks. Now you have to actually buy a trick in one of the stores before you can perform it. This makes it really tedious to try to get points in the slope style events early on because no matter how good you are, the big-point tricks can't be performed until you buy them. They cost $150,000 each to buy or learn, and given that you can earn typically $5,000 to $10,000 for winning a race, you begin to understand how long it can take to unlock what used to be a staple feature of the SSX games.

The biggest problem of all
EA have changed the control mechanism for SSXOT, and this combined with the save game problem (below) are reasons enough not to recommend this game. In SSX Tricky and SSX 3, the control systems were basically identical. You'd think then, that for the next game in the series, it would make sense to keep the same control system. You'd be wrong. They've replaced the button combinations for uber-tricks with the second control stick. That used to be used for punching and hitting, so now those controls have been moved to the shoulder buttons. But the single worst desicion EA made was to swap the old 'cancel' and 'grab' buttons. On the Gamecube, the "X" button used to be "cancel" which reset your rider mid air or if they got stuck behind a tree. The "Z" shoulder button (along with the "L" and "R" shoulder buttons) was one of the three grab buttons. EA have swapped the "X" and "Z" buttons over so now, the third grab button is almost impossible to use in-game, whilst the cancel button is where the third grab button used to be. This means that if you liked the control system of SSX Tricky or SSX3, you are going to have an absolutely miserable time with this game because you'll forever be cancelling jumps, tricks and moves because you're hitting the old 'grab' button. This is such a simple thing yet something which EA should not have changed. Why they did is a mystery to me, and it takes a vast amount of enjoyment away from the game. Worse still, of course, if you do get used to this new button layout, it means when you go back to the older games, you'll have the same problem, constantly cancelling moves because of the button change. I despise change for the sake of it in any product, and this is simply an inexcusable fault on EA's part.

Graphics, sound, look and feel
The graphics for SSXOT are about the same as they have been for the previous titles, with the exception of more trees. There's something a little odd about it though and its hard to put my finger on what it is. It's like a lot of the slick, neon SSX-ness of the game has gone, instead replaced with a dull, more realistic environment. One the one hand that might be seen as a step in the right direction but that's not what SSX games are about. They're about pumping tunes, garish neon landscapes, fireworks, explosions and insane stunts.
Oh yes - the music. Turn it off. Turning it off probably doubles the playability of the game. Gone are are the slick tecnho, trance and rhythm and bass tracks of the previous titles, instead replaced by a playlist of death metal, grunge metal, heavy metal, hard rock and metal rock. It's a personal choice, but I cannot stand that crap and for me, having it on whilst playing the game is incredibly distracting.
The other sounds in the games are as good as always though with nice snow sounds, ambient effects, wildlife, spectators and for the first time, other skiers. The giggling kids on the learner slope cry satisfyingly if you hit them whilst the older kids and grown ups hurl family-friendly insults at you (ie no swearing).

The save game problem
I don't know if this is just a quirk of the Gamecube version or not, but there's a serious bug in the save game feature. Irrespective of whether you autosave or save the game manually, if you do it on a memory card that has anything else on it, SSX On Tour can't read its own game files. The only way I've been able to make it work consistently is to have a blank memory car with nothing but the SSX On Tour game info on it. This is a serious problem with the game and EA have been particularly unhelpful in trying to remedy it. Some internet forums are complaining about this problem too. So realistically the only way to play the game in any useful form is to get yourself a memory card uniquely for this game. Which is a total pain in the butt.

Overall
If you're a die-hard SSX fan and simply must play the game, then it might be worth your while. I'm a die-hard SSX fan and I'm sorely disappointed with this latest offering. Too much has changed just for the sake of it. I wanted a new bunch of tracks, some new tricks and some new characters. What I got was different enough from the previous titles that it plays more like Amped on the Xbox. And that is most certainly not a good thing for an SSX title :-(