SSX Tricky

Six Uber tricks in a run and the word TRICKY finishes spelling itself across the HUD, Run-DMC's chorus cuts through Rahzel's beatboxing, and your boost meter stays pinned for the rest of the descent. That single feedback loop is what separates the 2001 sequel from the launch title it was built on. The original SSX asked you to trade tricks for speed. This one asks you to keep escalating until the mountain gives up.

EA Canada's revision is not shy about how much it borrows from itself. Several courses return from the first game, tuned rather than rebuilt, and the racing model is recognisably the same: heavy boarders, generous air, rails and shortcuts hidden a few metres off the obvious line. What changed is the trick vocabulary. Ubers are absurd by design, board-off contortions with names announced over the PA, and they only unlock once you have earned them, which keeps the flashiest moves as a reward rather than a default. Tokyo Megaplex, with its pinball bumpers and neon half-pipes, is the clearest statement of intent — a course that has abandoned any pretence of being a mountain.

The roster got a personality transplant too. Elise, Psymon, Mac and the rest were sketches before; here they are voiced by recognisable actors, Lucy Liu among them, and they trade insults on the lift and shoulder-check each other mid-run. The rivalry system is thin as a mechanic, mostly an excuse for grabbing and shoving, but it gives the World Circuit a shape that pure lap times would not.

What holds up is the handling. Landings are forgiving without being weightless, the boost curve rewards commitment over caution, and a good run through Aloha Ice Jam still reads as one continuous motion rather than a string of separate tricks. What has aged is the presentation gloss — the celebrity casting and MTV-adjacent soundtrack date the thing precisely to its year, and the difficulty spikes late in the circuit are cheap in the way early-decade arcade sports games often were.

EA Sports BIG never found a better argument for its house style than this: loud, weightless, entirely uninterested in being a snowboarding game.