SSX

The snow remembers. Carve a hard line through Elysium Alps and the groove stays there, deepening as riders churn the same corner lap after lap, until the course you finish on is measurably rougher than the one you started. In 2000 that was the sort of trick a launch title existed to perform, proof that the new hardware could do something the PlayStation could not. What made it stick was that EA Canada built it into the racing rather than leaving it as scenery.

The design's real engine is the boost meter. Tricks are not decoration or a separate scoring minigame; every grab, spin and rail grind feeds a bar that you spend on raw speed, which means the fastest line down a mountain is rarely the safest one. Landing clean matters more than launching big. Bail on a rotation and you lose the boost, the position and usually your nerve for the next jump. That loop is tight enough that the two ways to play the game, racing and showing off, turn out to be the same activity.

Six courses is not many, but they are designed to be learned rather than sampled. Tokyo Megaplex is a neon pinball table with half-pipes and moving hazards; Aloha Ice Jam is a stadium event with crowds and shortcuts stacked above the main line; Pipedream is the reward for surviving the circuit, a ribbon of tube hung in the sky with very little margin. The riders come with attitude, snide radio chatter and a hard-edged electronic soundtrack, and the aggression extends to contact — opponents shoulder-check, and so should you.

What has aged is the presentation around the edges: the character banter is very much of its moment, and the rubber-banding AI keeps races closer than they deserve to be. What holds up is the handling, which is heavy in the right way, with real weight in the landings and a genuine sense of a board on a slope rather than a cursor on a track. Tricky sharpened all of it a year later and buried the original in most people's memories.

Still the purer version, and the one where a run down the mountain feels like it costs you something.