This game – EA’s SSX Blur – confounds me. It’s not just the controls. I’ll freely admit right now that I don’t feel like I’ve mastered the controls. I’ve almost completed every event on the first section of the game, but I continue to improve in my handling of them. They are really complicated, but, for the most part, feel more and more natural the more you use them. However, I just feel like I personally suck at them.

SSX Blur uses a nunchuck attachment. To steer, you use the analog stick, and to make sharp turns you tilt the nunchuck while using the stick. This is called “carving” and it feels very nice once you get the hang of it. Jumping is accomplished by moving the nunchuck up quickly, and spins and grabs are then accomplished by spinning and tilting either the nunchuck or main remote. There’s also ubertricks, but I’ll do that later.

Here lies one of the primary advantages in control in comparison to the traditional older games. It is also one of the more confounding parts, at least for me. You see, all this motion, well, it just confuses me. I don’t have the coordination to spin two different things in different directions while still using buttons. This is probably bad for a Wii owner. I can just randomly spin and grab, but doing anything specific is now impossible, at least for me.

I don’t really feel like I can rate these controls, though. Some people I’ve had play the game seem to pick up on them naturally, and do pretty well on their first few races. Some people are just utterly confused like myself and put down the controller after a few minutes. The opinion on the Internet is a wider range than this. All I can tell you is rent it and reiterate that Nintendo needs to put up demos on the Wii Shop Channel.

But, back to the controls themselves. Ubertricks are accomplished by drawing a shape on the screen. This is so cumbersome there is actually a training mode so you can practice it, and I cannot do it regularly even in the training screen. This strikes me as an order of magnitude worse than the regular controls, which really feel like they should work if I wasn’t such an uncoordinated clumsy geek.

This still leaves us with the actual game, which unfortunately, is merely good at best. SSX3′s wonderful artwork, course design, characters, and advancement system add up so that it remains the pinnacle of the series. SSX On Tour threw most of that out the window, and SSX Blur, which is actually a sort of mash-up of those two titles, comes out appropriately between them.

Unlike SSX On Tour’s generic dudes, you get to play as a classic SSX cast member. Unfortunately, there is zero customizability, unlike SSX3. Also, there characters really end up being flat skins with no personality, as there is no voice acting. No insane British accent screams from Moby or quickly dispensed Japanese from Kaori. They’re just kinda there. In the end, they might as well be Miis or other user-created characters, as they really have no personality at all.

The courses are a mix of retooled SSX3 and On Tour courses. Unfortunately, they lack the solid art direction of the courses in 3, which had a certain je ne sais quoi in their design that isn’t replicated here. (Yes, I just used a French phrase to describe a racing game.) They look OK, but not as good as 3. This is a common theme in the game.

I don’t know if I can recommend SSX Blur. Maybe you will get the controls. Maybe you will not be a pretentious and picky gamer like myself. Maybe you won’t. I do know that you should rent it if you’re a fan of the series; otherwise, it’s not the next great Wii game we’re all waiting for, but it still might be worth a try.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 12:38 pm and is filed under games, reviews.