After a two-year hiatus, the SSX team has returned to bring one of the most authentic, albeit ridiculously defiant of physics, snowboardercross games the world has ever known back to its fans with a completely new philosophy. After the somewhat minor improvements made in SSX Tricky, the developers decided to take some time to design a totally different approach to competition with a familiar control scheme and add tons of goodies like new tricks, courses, and riders. It's Alive…and It Wants You Dead! One of the most thrilling differences of SSX 3 is its single-mountain design, in which one gigantic (and malevolent) mountain with three separate peaks serves as the setting for all events. This mountain possesses even more varied terrain than its international predecessors from the previous games, and it more closely mimics the actual feeling of a day on the slopes (provided one is in the habit of taking a helicopter in order to get there). In addition, course events, such as terrifyingly destructive avalanches, blinding snow flurries, passing trains, and collapsing hunks of track, all take an almost perverse joy in pummeling your rider and add to the frenetic, adrenaline-junkie tempo of SSX 3. Shaka, Brah! The depth of gameplay in SSX 3 is extraordinarily expansive—whether gamers are performing incomparable chains of combos through the use of stalls, tail and nose presses, grabs, handplants, and two distinct levels of Uber tricks in Freestyle mode, or grinding across glistening, snow-covered branches (and virtually every other edge) in order to smoke the competition speedwise in Race mode. SSX 3 also makes it more appetizing to simply explore the mountain by offering tantalizing bonuses earned through the Freeride mode. During all three of these modes, riders enjoy an even more advanced and tight control scheme than before, and an unbelievable soundtrack of thumping funk and techno tracks from such notables as Fisher Spooner, Jane’s Addiction, and the Chemical Brothers. Winterstick fanatics rejoice—for the price of a lift ticket, SSX 3 provides longer runs with more hits and jumps than you ever thought possible.
