EA wanted to take the series in a new direction, but only made bad decisions. all the personality and dialogue from the original characters have been removed. the game runs at half the framerate of SSX3 and Tricky. the monster tricks break the flow of gameplay by introducing slowmo and turning the camera so that you can't see the ground beneath you. there's like 2 diplo songs on it. every aspect of the game is a downgrade from the masterpiece that immediately preceded it, and yet it's still an arcade snowboarding game that came out after everyone else had abandoned the genre, and that in itself is a damn triumph.

there is one thing about this game that bothers the shit out of me. the game is complicated. you'd think it plays like a bust a groove 2, and it should, but what you'll notice after a few songs is that sometimes both you and the CPU will miss a note at the same time. and it will always happen either right before a solo, or at the end of a song.

this is because any dance move that ends a combo (a Freeze) requires 4 beats to complete. if there are 4 or more beats before a solo, the character does their Cool/Chillin/Freeze move, does a pose in which you don't do an input for a beat, and then starts the combo over. it rules. it feels good to hit those. however, if the solo is coming up on the next beat, the move will automatically miss regardless of your timing.

so how do you get around this? unlike BaG2, BaG1 allows you to enter the input for any part of your combo any time you want. for example, say the first move of your combo is just Circle. the next move is Down Down X, the third is Down Left X. at any point, no matter where you are in the dance, you can press Down Left X and go to step 3 of your combo. why does the game let you do this? because you have to know, before the verse starts, how many beats there are between the start of the song and the first solo. a full combo is 32 beats (8 measures), and if there are 9 measures between the start of the song and the solo then you're good to go; just push your buttons. but if there are exactly measures left, you can't just do your normal combo. because if you try to hit the end of your combo on that 8th measure, the game will give you a miss.

so you need to do some manipulation here. you can kill a note by attacking or whiffing a dodge, so that on the 8th measure you end up on the 7th measure of your combo. you get less points for not getting all the way up to Freeze, but it's an easy fix. but the best thing to do is to skip one of your steps. instead of pressing Down Down X when it appears on the screen, press Down Left X instead. the game will skip the 2nd step and go straight to the 3rd. now you're one measure ahead; your combo will end in 7 measures, with the 1 extra measure the game needs to accept your Freeze move.

so far this is weird, but it's not that big a deal: just memorize what songs require you to skip a beat and remember an easy, two-button input to enter to skip one of the early steps. but then the math changes when you want to attack or dodge. say you don't skip a step, because you know you've got 9 measures before your solo and all you need are 8. but then Heat chucks a fireball at you. you gotta dodge that. but now you're one measure behind where you were initially; you're on pace to hit your Freeze on the last note before the solo. that's a miss! so you have to know what the next step of your combo is, wherever you might be in the chain. if you're 4 moves in, you need to do the input for the 6th. is it DUD Circle? is it DDRLL Circle? you have to memorize all 35 possible combinations in order to do this optimally. i've been playing this shit casually for like 20 years and I haven't done that. so usually you just attack, or whiff a dodge, or bite the bullet and watch the points from your perfectly timed Freeze slip away.

what kills me is that the game designers knew that this would happen. they designed this giant memory game that required them to unify every input in the game and give the player the freedom to choose their place on the combo chart provided they memorized all 35 possible combinations that can appear outside of a solo. they did this, when all they had to do was just let you do a cool pose at the end of the song. nothing happens during that measure anyway. Bust A Groove 2 does this. you even get a special pose if you do the timing right. it's like they identified a problem and chose to solve it by implementing a system that i bet the overwhelming majority of people playing the game never even noticed was there. they did it just to spite the literal one person on earth obsessive enough to care. they did it to spite me.

5 stars.