The SSX franchise was a massive step forward for snowboarding games, breaking free from the shackles of the likes of 1080 Snowboarding on N64 Cool Boarders on PS1 – suddenly you felt fully in control of your boarder rather than like you were fighting the tracks, plus the graphical upgrade was substantial.
SSX ONTOUR PSP PORTABLE
This PSP version adapts the best tracks from SSX3 and as such, makes it a portable offering that’s even better than I imagined it being and one that I loved revisiting for this review.
SSX ONTOUR PSP SERIES
While SSX On Tour does have a few flaws that make it inferior to its predecessors, the game still has that addictive vibe that made the series such a hit in the first place. Soundtrack highlight – Lousy Reputation (We Are Scientists) Overall though, it’s just so impressive to see graphics like this in a 2005 PSP game – a fantastic precursor to what the system would become over the coming years, plus it still looks stunning on Vita to this day. There’s very little in the way of voice acting here though which is a bit of a shame, as the characters have such defined voices at this point. I enjoyed Iron Maiden and LCD Soundsystem, both bringing very different vibes to the mountain-carving. The soundtrack is a mix of era-appropriate rock with some rap mixed in, quite fitting with the previous EA Sports BIG musical selections I’ve heard. It’s fine and is mostly contained only in the menus, but feels oddly juxtaposed with the more fantastical elements of the graphical design. The one thing I didn’t quite like about On Tour is that it adopts this doodle aesthetic, kind of similar to that seen in games like Drawn to Death and popularised at the time by things like Napoleon Dynamite. It all runs at an incredible pace too and I didn’t notice any dropped frames, hitches, glitches or any other technical problems, although the load times can be a little bit on the long side. The fact you can nearly always make out the snowy mountains in the distance just adds to the fantastical enjoyment. I marvelled at some of the aspects of the environments too – you smash through glass, lop the tops off trees as you crash through them and see helicopters moving the snow as they blast over the landscape. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at just from an artistic perspective and there’s plenty of variety too, with neon lit cityscapes in the half-pipe events a particular highlight.Ĭharacter models are probably the least impressive part of the package with simplistic limbs and basic clothing, but when you watch them contort their bodies as they pull of tricks while a stream of purple light follows behind them, it’s hard not to be impressed. The game goes for pastel colours which I absolutely adore – soft blues and purples – but it mixes them in with effects like orange screen glare or sheer cliff drops with misty depths below. There’s always been a sort of fantastical heightened sense of reality when hurtling down the mountains of the SSX series and that’s never been more apparent than on the smaller screen of the PSP (and the vibrant OLED screen of the Vita). There was some true technical wizardry happening on the PSP during 20 and SSX On Tour is yet another example of this – it’s an absolutely stunning achievement that nails every aspect of the presentation it attempts. This is something SSX has gotten right in the past though, so it’s difficult to see it much more neutered here. None of this is bad, just different and fairly standard for a sports game. Lacking from SSX Tricky and SSX3 is the banter between competitors alongside characters like Zoe seeming surprisingly muted compared to how I remember her. Unfortunately, at least for this PSP port, you’re not given a great deal more to go on than this. For the first time in the series, SSX On Tour pits you as a custom-created character aiming to conquer the peaks against the seasoned snowboarders and skiers from previous SSX entries.
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