08.22.07
SSX Blur Review
I’ve been a big fan of the SSX series, and this game has some solid improvements. Some of the old courses are there as well as some nice new ones. The music was surprisingly fun and seemed to be based off of your movements to some extent. They’ve gone back to upgrading the riders points after winning an event rather than having to go to the lodge (which I found kind of clumsy in the last version). Everything has a bit more polish.
But after renting for a week I don’t intend on buying even though there is so much of interest left in the game. I (and another friend) found the controls to be sloppy and tiresome. Shaking the remotes to recover from a fall gets old really quickly. It was hard to repeat even basic tricks exactly. I try to shake or flip the controller in the right way and find it doing a different trick, or not registering at all. Ubertricks now are complicated shapes to draw. Even on the practicing screen trying over and over again I could never top a 2/3 success rate on even the simplest tricks. When you are going for the big tricks in events you don’t have time to try drawing the shape several times… you need it to work. My arms just hurt after an hour of playing this game, it isn’t exercise it is just bad jerky movements to try to get it to respond.
The one aspect of the motion sensing I liked was the use of the nunchuck to steer. A combination of tilting from side to side and using the analog stick (each with a slightly different effect) is used to control the riders side to side movement. This worked nicely and naturally (after a few minutes to get used to it).
It might be worth it if you think motion sensing is the greatest thing evar, but I found it clumsy and would recommend SSX 3 instead. Get the GameCube version, you can play it on the Wii with the Wavebird and everything is happy again.
Overall I give it 2 stars.