SSX Blur (Wii) Review

When EA announced SSX Blur, understandably many felt a little apprehensive about the series making its way to Wii. Afterall, with the system being touted as for people who had never played games before, how would a game like SSX, a franchise notorious for being one for the more hardcore of gamers, translate? Thankfully, EA have ignored the ‘simple games’ stigma that Wii has been subject to and even given it a bit of a kick up the behind (hopefully pushing towards the label disappearing) – SSX Blur is compromised for nobody.

Immediately it’s not difficult to tell that this game is one of the most challenging to be found on Wii to date, and thus it is probably a dream come true for those people wanting more of a challenge than the likes of Wii Sports and Wario Ware: Smooth Moves offer. The competition in all game modes is fierce, the track design can be vicious and the controls don’t help at all, and not because they are unwieldy. This is one game where the tutorial mode should be the first thing you’re clicking on…

Indeed, it will probably take a majority of players a fair amount of time before they can grasp every aspect of the game’s controls, as they’ve all been completely re-done for Wii. The nunchuk is mainly reserved for movement, while the remote handles tricks. Acceleration and deceleration is controlled with the analogue stick. To jump, a swift upward motion of the ‘chuk is all that is needed. To carve (that’s ‘swerve’ to us non-snowboarding proles), the player merely has to twist the nunchuk left or right, with the analogue stick being used for a little extra control on the turn (though you can adjust how much motion sensing and how much the joystick are used, from entirely motion sensing to entirely stick). While this might sound straightforward enough, it actually takes some time to get used to as you have no central point of reference for movement as you would with an analogue stick, and for the first 10 – 20 minutes it feels like more of a nuisance than anything else. The less patient will switch to entirely analogue control before they are used to the default control, but we urge you to stick it out, as once you have grasped it it’s sublime, supremely smooth and instinctive. Going back to analogue controls feels alien.

As mentioned, the remote is given the task of controlling tricks, such as spins and flips. Flicking it to the left will result in an anti-clockwise spin and the opposite for a right flick, while an upward or downward flick gives a backwards or forwards flip respectively. This pretty much works all of the time, but there is a temptation to simply wave the remote around in the air during big jumps, which takes away any feeling of grace that could have been attributed to it. The nunchuk is also used for mid-air grabs (hold down Z while off the ground and twist the nunchuk in any direction), though this was one element of control that we did not like – each direction of nunchuk movement is supposed to be mapped to one type of grab, but we would do entirely different movements and get the same trick. It’s a letdown compared to the rest of the control, though shaking the remote and nunchuk to recover from a fall isn’t much better.

Übertricks are the final things that need to be covered on the control front. These special moves are performed during huge jumps (or small ones, if you feel like throwing yourself stupidly into drifts of snow or, in the worst case, piles of rocks) by holding A and drawing a shape in the air with either the remote or the nunchuk and remote in conjunction, depending on the complexity of the trick. These function well, and with a bit of practice anybody should be able to perform them – they range in difficulty from extremely simple to snow-chance-in-hell. The main problem is in the timing of the button press to make you land properly, which can only be mastered with a bit of trial and error.

To use Übertricks, your Groove Meter needs to be at level 3 or higher. Essentially a specials meter, it fills up the more tricks you do and allows you to carry out these special tricks once you’ve reached a sufficient level of…grooviness, we presume. It can also be used as a turbo meter by pressing Z, which will make your character go zooming off and sap away at the Groove Meter in return. Another cool aspect of the Groove Meter is how it affects the music: the higher it is, the more instruments and layers will be added to the in-game music. If you mess up and your meter is empty, you will be rewarded with little to no music and must build it up again by boarding well. The music, incidentally, is very good and once again is by Junkie XL.

It’s not just music that gets a thumbs-up from us – the presentation as a whole is excellent. The menu screens are clear and obviously designed with the Wii remote in mind, with big clickable options so that you’re not likely to pick the wrong thing, and as your cursor moves around the screen snowflakes descend from it, filling the screen more and more the faster you zoom it about. Voice acting on the part of the DJ is well done, but unfortunately voices of the boarders and skiers have been removed from previous versions, with the exception of a few ‘ouch’s, though quite why we don’t know. Graphically, it’s on the level of upper-end Gamecube titles, which is great compared to some other Wii titles but still leaves plenty of room for improvement in future games. We enjoy it when characters fall over in the snow only to get up with the stuff all over them, until it can be shook off with a bit of speed.

It’s not too probable that you’ll run out of things to do in SSX Blur. There’s a variety of game modes, from the standard race to slopestyle freestyle trick courses (our personal favourites), to the half-pipe (which we didn’t get on with too well, but that’s probably down to needing practice more than anything else). There’s tons to be unlocked, from new characters to more Übertricks (by collecting tokens), to new courses and so on. The career mode is also quite long and features you exploring all the nooks and crannies of the peaks to complete challenges, and there’re random little things like designer artwork to unlock. It’s all a great package and it will take many hours from the most hardened of gamers to get it all finished. Throw in a split screen two player mode and you have superb value for money. And you can’t beat the feeling of unlocking all three peaks and being able to slide down the entire mountain in one swoop, though we’re sure some people will be disappointed that essentially the courses are remixed from past SSXs.

SSX Blur is an excellent example of a game from an existing series than adapts almost seamlessly to Wii. However, it is not quite perfect – some of the controls are dodgy where some are brilliant, which knocks it down a little in our estimation, and of course there’s the complaint that it is not all-new content in terms of courses. It’s definitely on the right tracks though, and we’re looking forward to more Wii versions of the franchise. Hardcore gamers only need apply…