SSX On Tour
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PSP
| SSX On Tour

Are games the New Rock and Roll? Everything else has been, from comedy to football to stamp collecting - or 'philately' for the pedants. (Everything, that is, with definite exception of pedantry.) If it is gaming's turn, then SSX On Tour is the cheeky, yet effortlessly cool, band at the Reading Festival, third down from the headliners but with all the right kids in the moshpit. Whilst it's firmly a snowboarding and skiing game, this UMD comes loaded with the looks, sounds, and excitement of the music scene. SSX hails from corporate giant Electronic Arts and its fanzine stylings are doubtless a result of focus groups and a million dollars of graphic design. But who cares? It works. Most games are either set in a murky warzone, or else they're full of day-glow colours and sunshine. SSX tunes into MTV.

Still, looks only get a game so far: just like a band, the question is, how does it play? And the answer here is finger-tappingly thrillingly.

Think that floating down the powdery white slopes of a high altitude resort sounds relaxing? Think again: SSX is noisy, frenetic, and fantastic in every sense of that word. Think: pulling off impossible combinations of tricks, railslides, twists and turns. Think: jumping off cliffs so high you'd need a parachute in reality. Think: insane courses boasting giant gorillas and cable car crashes that blur past twice as fast as the view outside the window of the train you're playing on. Think: all of that, all at once.

Just getting down the mountain is hard at first, partly because of those distractions, but also because you need to build up a certain amount of speed to attack the courses at something like their racing line. To progress, you must take a step back, and start pulling off the nosebleeds, stalefish, tweaked tailgrabs and the plethora of other tricks that increase your 'boost bar' to get extra speed. Then you must do the tricks with optimal timing - and then backwards.

Happily, when you eventually start chaining together strings of combos and setting your boost bar on fire, you feel like a rock god. Unlike, say, WipEout Pure, where hard-earned mastery boils down to not appearing like you're hovercrafting under the influence, in SSX you really do look like a PSP ninja. The rocksteady four-way local multiplayer mode is a boon here: your friends have no choice but to see how good you are when you're shredding past them and leaving them adrift.

See, SSX On Tour is all about speed, but you need the tricks to get a move on. The result is peculiarly taxing, but in a good way.

It's not easy, yet not stupidly hard, to get going. The game is both forgiving and rewarding, in that a near-stumble can be recovered by pressing square, whilst you can't help pulling off a trick with nothing more than random button presses. But to start winning tracks and ascending the leaderboard you need to know exactly what you're doing - find fresh combos, squeeze in an extra tweak or handplant onto a new area of the track - all the time keeping your speed up.

Once you've mastered the basics of the trick system, you'll start beating your qualifying runs and making progress through SSX's Series structure, known as The Tour. This is made up of Races (pretty clear), Slope Style (basically downhill trick-fests) and Big Air (all about ridiculous airborne antics). Winning medals pushes you up the leaderboard, unlocking equipment and clothing that boosts your speed and other abilities, and giving you a shot at new challenges. Collectibles and mastering the semi-hidden 'Monster Tricks' add to the mix; it will take many hours for SSX newcomers to explore and conquer all of this game's nooks and crannies.

Bum notes? SSX is yet another game that slaps band information onto the screen when a new song starts playing, temporarily obscuring part of the action. You can't customise your character to begin with, just choose your sex (you can unlock outfits later). There are a few moments where the PSP struggles to draw the screen as fast as you're moving. And skiing and snowboarding are very similar in gameplay terms, albeit with different animations.

Those flaws should sound like niggles. More importantly, arguably, is the fact that owners of the last couple of SSX iterations on the consoles won't find much new content here (less, as the PSP version is more linear). As ever though, you can't take a PlayStation 2 onto the bus. If you hate 'young people's music' and all that goes with it, avoid SSX. And if you don't fancy learning myriad button combos just to get down a hill before the weekend, it isn't for you either.

But if you're after a PSP game worth mastering - a candidate for repeated encores - then SSX On Tour tops the bill. SSX On Tour is on sale now.

SSX On Tour

Less Snow Patrol, more monster riffs, this cool racer is a breath of fresh (big) air
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