GENRE
	Racing
	DEVELOPER
	EA Montreal
	PUBLISHER
	Electronic Arts
	NUMBER OF PLAYERS
	1-4
	WI-FI ENHANCED
	No
	DS COMPATIBLE
	No
	BUY NOW AT

SSX Blur walks up to meet you, and instead of a friendly handshake you get handcuffed in a tangle of Wii remote-to-nunchuk wiring. No, Electronic Arts' sequel in the hit series doesn't want to be loved-- at least not without a fight. Whether it's the smug and unattractive redesigned character portraits, a bare-bones seven page manual, or hit-and-miss controls, this boarder is tough to love. Yet after some initial struggling, it becomes a truly addictive and fulfilling experience.

visuals

Prior to SSX Blur's release, the word most used to describe this Wii-exclusive title was that SSX's entire concept and presentation had been "Wii-ified." Such a term is hard to qualify this early in a console life cycle, but in the case of visuals, SSX Blur has characters more “cartoonishly” stylized than before as well as a graphics engine not too different from what was already seen on GameCube.

On-screen, the game immediately shows it is in the hands of a different team than the one that established this series. EA Montreal has taken the reigns from EA Canada to create this sequel, and working with such an established franchise presents challenges when attempting to make something genuinely new that also doesn't defy gamers' expectations. In this case, the most obvious visual change is character design. While the new cartoon portraits of the returning and new characters are artistically sound, they're all much more obscure than they've ever been, and at times there is a significant disconnect between the concept art (much of which can be unlocked while progressing through the single player mode) and the actual player models. Perhaps the most obvious differentiation is with returning Japanese character Kaori, who appears almost as a wide-faced Latina in her artwork, but then looks like a pale, purse-lipped Asian baby doll in-game.

The three-peaked mountain the game's set upon, perhaps the most important character of all, retains all the natural elements prequels in the series have featured, be they sparkling snow, rough ice, fluttering crows, and wooded cliffs. The more over-the-top elements that made titles like Tricky so appealing, such as boarding over artificial snow in Hawaii or the desert-- or better yet-- weaving through an urban landscape or inside an oversized pinball machine, are much more toned-down or completely absent. In SSX Blur, gamers are taking on nature much more often than man-made, fantasy-styled frivolities. The pyrotechnic fireworks that accompanied speed and successful tricks and landings are also dramatically reduced, which makes the game seem much tamer in comparison to the bombastic, over-the-top reputation it has established since 2000.

Aside from solid frame rate and 480p/16:9 high definition widescreen support, the game also shines in its menu interfaces. Excellent music throbs as black lines dart across the screen, establishing the perimeters of vibrantly colored buttons and information boxes. This simple, black-and-bright aesthetic complements the cartoon-stylized characters and is very attractive.

audio

Electronic Arts games have become known for licensed music soundtracks that span a variety of artists within a given genre, so the developer's decision to hitch SSX Blur's music to a single electronica artist, DJ Junkie XL, could have been a fumble. Yet this game's soundtrack is a clear highlight for fans of techno and big beat music, which is probably some of the best since the highs of Fatboy Slim, Hybrid and BT in the late '90s and early '00s. Increasing the music's appeal is how it has been tied to the game's boost/trick meter, named the "Groove Meter" in Blur. This Groove Meter is split into five chunks, and as the gamer successfully completes tricks or boards swiftly, the meter gets filled up. For each chunk of the meter that gets filled, an additional layer of instrumentation is layered over the background music. By riding well, a tune that starts out as a subtle drum beat can quickly become a booming song with melodic synthesizers and jittery sound effects.

Yet for all that can be appreciated in the composition, if the on-screen boarder crashes, or even pauses a nano-second too long at the top of a half pipe curve, the music abruptly squawks to silence. Regardless if the Groove Meter is 4/5ths full, any pause or wreck immediately shuts the music off until the gamer regains speed or performs tricks. This love-it or hate-it feature can either be seen as an experience-jarring nuisance or worthwhile reward for playing well, since the music is solid.

After SSX Tricky's over-the-top celebrity cast of voice talent for each boarder, the characters in later sequels have not had as much personality or things to say. This remains true in Blur, wherein the boarders are generally quiet regardless of rivalries, crashes or victories. Accompanying sound effects, such as the sound of the board over snow versus ice, or how the music cuts out for an Uber-trick, are serviceable but again, toned-down in comparison to some of the earlier entries in the series.

gameplay

In short, the following suggestions-- or control options-- are humbly requested for any SSX Blur Wii sequel...

1. Steering/carving should only be the analog stick. The range between tilting the nunchuk and tilting the thumbstuck to steer is nebulous, some nunchuk twisting is uncomfortable for the wrist, and all of this contributes to making the slalom events near impossible. Thankfully, this is remedied via a hard-to-find options screen.
2. Jumping should only be the A-button. This improves pre-winding a jump and eliminates the possibility of re-crashing a boarder when shaking the remote and nunchuk to recover from a previous crash.
3. An on-screen indicator with trailing ink should appear when drawing Uber-tricks. The game's interpretation of symbols is too difficult to predict when a gamer can't even see what he just drew on-screen in the first place.

Yet this list is getting ahead of truly describing the gameplay. EA Montreal had its work cut out when it came to designing how to play a six-year old franchise with all-new motion-sensitive controllers. By and far, the development team has delivered a truly revolutionary and creative control scheme, perhaps more ambitious than the majority of Wii titles that have been released. Series fans who fretted that "Wii-ifying" the control scheme meant dumbing it down should not fret here. "Wii-ify," when applied to Blur's gameplay, does not mean "simplified" or "toned down" here. Rather, SSX Blur's gameplay Wii-ification is much more the opposite direction, and truly is the lynchpin its appeal hinges upon.

In short, Wii remote-and-nunchuk snowboarding will chew most gamers up in an instant, spitting them out two hours later. The learning curve is phenomenally steep, in spite of how appealing the concept may sound after breezy hours of Wii Sports, Twilight Princess or Trauma Center. As the game manual states, "Be sure to check out the SSX Blur tutorials before you even think about strapping up." Said tutorials are greatly challenging and will require much more than a five minute side-trip. Snowboarding in SSX Blur is not rote button pressing. It's more akin to an art, or at least a sport that requires genuine hand/eye coordination beyond most video games.

The nunchuk controls the boarder while she or he is on the ground: the stick steers and accelerates, while left/right tilts of the peripheral implement sharper turns. While in the air (jumps are accomplished with a nunchuk yank or A-button press), holding the Z-button and tilting the nunchuk implements one of four grabs, while yanking and tilting the remote in various directions affects spinning, though grabs can only be combined with spins if the spin is started first. Pressing and releasing the A button halts tricks in mid-air, flipping the snowboarder into landing position, which is almost always necessary given all the motion sensitivity. Also, back on the ground, pressing the B-button and twitching the remote will throw snowballs at collectible items or rival boarders. If a boarder crashes, shaking both the remote and nunchuk is intended to get the boarder up swiftly, but this is a poorly designed and ill-advised suggestion since a boarder may jump to his feet, only to attempt to jump and spin in place because you're still shaking the controllers a second too long.

This probably sounds like a lot, and it is, though Uber-tricks have more controls on top of that. After filling the Groove Meter to level 3 or higher, Uber-tricks can be attempted, but they require completely different gestures. Going back to the art metaphor that previously described Blur's gameplay, an Uber-trick is accomplished by holding down the remote's A-button and blindly "drawing" a shape mid-air with either the remote or both the remote and nunchuk, such as a heart, loop, coat hanger or the letter "Z." Conceptually it sounds simple, but there is never an on-screen pointer to indicate what is being drawn, so many gamers will probably need hours of arm-flailing practice to find the precise, acceptable gesture the game wants. Even then, a gamer could certainly draw a heart with the remote and nunchuk, only to see the game register the gesture as a sideways, double-looped "U" drawn only with the remote.

Mastery of these controls is required to succeed in events such as races, halfpipes, slalom, or even simple item collecting. A downfall of the game's overall design, however, is how hidden options and practice areas are that would benefit the novice gamer. The nearly impossible slalom activities, for instance, are made much easier by "Tuning" the one aspect of control that's allowed within a buried options screen: snowboard steering can be shifted between the extremes of all-nunchuk-tilting versus all-analog-stick-tilting. Figuring out what the game really wants drawn for Uber-tricks is also greatly remedied if a player stumbles upon a "drawing" training screen buried in options and outside the training mode. The overly brief manual doesn't mention either of these items, and neither does the in-game training, which seems a significant oversight or an unwillingness to concede that the radical requirements of Blur's gameplay may be a bit too much for some.

All that said, EA Montreal still knew what it was doing. It didn't design an easy-way-out, hack-job control scheme, or something that ultimately is a failure top-to-bottom, which we've seen in other Wii titles. SSX Blur's gameplay represents a focused and intelligent effort to reinvigorate a franchise that was becoming stale after four titles. Once all the foibles and challenges of this control scheme are learned or adapted to, a Zen-like mood settles in, and a gamer can confidently charge at the game's many, many unlockable boards, outfits, attributes, characters and races. Just like the last couple SSX titles, Blur has a huge amount to experience and unlock, and after mastering all the gestures, a true sense of accomplishment is felt.

multiplayer

SSX Blur features split-screen two player racing or rotating hot seat play for events such as slalom, "Big Air" (jump off ramps to accumulate the greatest points and air time), and halfpipe. While a welcome addition to the package, this is really just more of the single player action, and finding other players who can jump in may be hard unless they've put an adequate number of hours into single player learning the controls. While playing with a relatively decent gaming buddy who couldn't pass a majority of the training events, we raced a single time split screen, and he gave up altogether afterwards since he found himself racing backwards down nearly half the track before summarily losing.

overall

The drive and effort behind the creation of SSX Blur is clearly ambitious. EA Montreal should be commended for actually producing something custom-tailored to Wii instead of just porting an old EA Canada SSX title. However, the development team has also created a game that runs against the "fun for the whole family" image that Nintendo has heavily cultivated for Wii. This is a hardcore gamer's game, intended for a gamer who has plenty of time, and perhaps more importantly, plenty of patience to invest in the initial three to six hours it takes to get a handle on the gameplay. After that, though, it all feels fun and a sense of achievement is genuinely felt while grooving through challenges over the excellent soundtrack.

Primary weaknesses of the title, beyond the learning curve, are blander-than-expected course designs, pyrotechnics and character personalities, in addition to the use of many minimally refreshed, recycled courses from older SSX titles. However, thanks to those new controls, SSX Blur is a fresh start for the franchise and sets a foundation for bigger and greater sequels, just as the series had in the last console generation. With this game as an example, there's little doubt the folks at EA will continue to deliver even more exciting Wii titles with control schemes that challenge, impress and inspire.

7.8/10