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 The
responsiveness of the controls in SSX is the single most enjoyable
aspect of the game. You never feel as though you're just watching
an animation complete or that something is happening too slowly
or incorrectly. You might complain when your character doesn't land
a jump, but you'll definitely know that it was all your fault, because
the game's controller responsiveness is dead on. The one complaint
some may have about the controls is that once you've started to
charge for a jump, it's not possible to change the direction of
your boarder as he or she approaches the jump. This, however, is
only true for the basic control scheme, where the left analog stick
controls the direction of your boarder and the direction of your
spin once you've depressed the jump button. The advanced control
setting separates these functions by letting you stay in control
of your boarder's direction at all times with the left analog stick
while giving you control of your boarder's rotation for his or her
aerial stunt using the D-pad. The rest of the controls remain the
same in both control schemes. The shoulder buttons allow you to
perform various grabs and tricks, which can be linked together for
combos and big points. The more points you score, the more boost
you earn, which in turn allows you to go faster, which makes landing
big tricks actually important. The X button is your jump button,
and you hold it when approaching a jump and then release it at the
top of the jump. The right analog stick allows you to shove your
competitors, which is an effective means of knocking opponents down
for some of the  larger
boarders. On the whole, turning and cutting across the snow in SSX
is the closest any game has come to representing what it's actually
like in real life. Even though SSX is more of an arcade-style game
that allows you to get crazy amounts of air and pull off crazy aerial
stunts, you always feel like you're going to catch an edge and take
a nosedive into the powder.
Graphically, SSX is by far the most visually stunning snowboarding
game we've ever seen, and it's also one of the most visually dynamic
PlayStation 2 titles we've seen so far. The characters in the game
look like anime characters. Their mouths move, they blink, and it's
really quite remarkable just how lifelike they are. The polygonal
models used for the characters are so smooth that you really have
to look to see any hard angles. Even more impressive is that the
animation of the boarders never pops or looks awkward in any way
when in transition from one trick to another. If you start to execute
a front grab then change your mind in mid-animation and go for a
heal grab, the animations
smoothly flow from one into the other with no delay. The textures
used for thecharacter's clothes and some portions of the environments
are incredibly rich and detailed. All of this graphical polish -
including effects like the snow spray that comes off the board when
you make a hard turn and the depression carved into the snow by
the boards - really helps make the game look convincing, as do the
impressive lighting effects, which are really shown off when fireworks
shoot into the sky and cast appropriately colored reflections of
light on the snow. The sense of speed that the game delivers is
amazing - when you're not playing the game it's actually hard to
watch since it zooms by so amazingly fast. As a whole the game is
visually stunning, thanks in great part to its almost constant 60fps
frame rate, which only dips every once in a great while - usually
when nearly every boarder is on the screen at once and the fireworks
go off.
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