A quick aside;- Spent the past few weeks on a bit of an PS3 emulation kick, knocking out a few stragglers from the gen 8 library that always managed to elude me. One of the games I tried out was the 2012 SSX reboot nobody really likes - god knows why I chose to start my foray into this series with that entry, it was just kind of there I guess. It was alright! Hard to really fault what appears to be a rock solid racing foundation w/ incredible feedback & thrills. I managed to get surprisingly close to the end of the game before my motivation careened off a couloir with the insistence of an awful statistical equipment store, gimmick missions like the oxygen tank, glider, solar power & rear-view cameras. If only EA made no less than three games beforehand where this memetic & metric excess is absent!!

Anyway SSX 3 is fucking sick. Nothing short of a landmark achievement for this game to accomplish as much as it does way back in 2003, all the while fully maintaining this feeling of modernity that makes it absolutely breezy to pick up blindly in current year. Snowboarding controls iterated on to a mirror shine, mechanically dense & full of freedom of expression in how you can approach the shockingly sprawling slopes that spread their tendrils through a track like a spaghetti bowl. Repeated heats thru race courses would have patchnotes I swear, the more I familiarised myself with their layout the more they’d pull the rug out from under me to reveal new avenues and secret paths. I love the blisteringly fast risk reward & fuckup cascade that can happen when your antic hubris meets its match & your teeth meet the grind rail. I fully expected this to just control like a breezy Tony Hawk clone or something, but it's so bespoke to itself & intensely demanding in a way that I adored losing myself to the mastery of.

Perhaps unshocking, but it’s also striking to me how much better this game looks over the next-gen reboot lol. Feels as though the art designers had no say in the way SSX 2012 looked, rendering the majority of its slopes a very grey textureless mush that only came across as too scared to introduce visually interesting locales like the audience’s eyes would just burst like blueberries under the tropical sun or something. SSX 3’s mountain is lined up like a daisy chain of unique vignettes with key visual identities and senses of purpose in the macro. I adore how the lighting and skybox would change subtly as you progress down the mountain, so when you do the ultimate no loading screen downhill jam through every track you’ve familiarised yourself with it feels like such a perfect odyssey. Unlockable Adam Warren art is rly great, particularly adore the concept art of the courses themselves and how franco belgian they look lol. Eventually I’ll play Tricky and enter the heated internal angel & devil inside of me debate between which of these two entries I prefer. I DEEPLY want these games to be added to that Noclip.website so I can see how these tracks curl in on themselves.