SSX is the first in a series of snowboarding video games which specializes in extreme sports titles with an unrealistic or arcade feel, including exaggerated jumps, highly decorated mountain runs and improbable trick. Winning medals in a variety of events unlocks new courses, characters, and boards, as well as improved the boarder's abilities. New outfits may be earned by completing a character's trick book, by doing a number of specific tricks during play. Three kinds of boards are available to players: trick-oriented Freestyle boards, all-around BX boards, and racing-oriented Alpine boards, which are not meant to be ridden backwards. The courses are located around the world. The snowboarders also come from around the world, and speak in their primary languages.
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Still a lot of fun after all these years. I've also never played Tricky.
Critically acclaimed at its time, playing through SSX now can feel a lot more like an exercise in futility. The mechanics are tight, and races are interesting, and the arcade style of racing is a lot more refined than other snowboarding games at the time. In isolation, playing this game feels mostly fine, and it's an enjoyable multiplayer experience. It's the difficulty and ruthlessness of the single-player mode that makes this game feel unrewarding. To get gold medals and advance in the game, it required finishing in the top 3 two races in a row, and then in 1st place in the third race. What's frustrating is that the AI doesn't make mistakes, so if you don't know the time-saving shortcuts, or you mess up a trick, you'll likely not be finishing in 1st. Since restarting a race puts you at the beginning of the 3 races, the game gets tedious and uninteresting very quickly.
On its surface, SSX is a fun game, especially to play with others, and it started a series that would go on to achieve much higher highs than this game did. Most of what made SSX enjoyable has been refined and perfected in its sequel, so there's little reason to play this game these days. SSX may be an obsolete game in the present, but at its time, it laid the groundwork for a successful arcade-style snowboarding game, and produced two sequels of outstanding quality.