I can’t remember if I’d had to enter a raffle or just place a regular pre-order or what to get my launch day PlayStation 2 on 24th November in the year 2000, but I do remember taking a day off work for it and picking it up very early in the morning from somewhere like Comet or Curry’s in a retail park attached to the Lakeside Shopping Centre, a relatively modern but culturally backward hell-hole in West Thurrock, located just outside of East London as you cross into Essex, that probably had more character when it was a chalk quarry! Anyway, at the time my now-wife and I were still living in our first flat not that far away, and one way or another I had my hands on a console and a whole long weekend ahead of me to sink my teeth into SSX!

Something else I can’t really remember is why SSX though! It would be another ten years or so before I first touched a real snowboard, and I’d played Cool Boarders 2 on the original PlayStation but wasn’t really fussed, so I’ll take a quick look at the rest of the launch lineup and see if a process of elimination rings any bells! If I was asked today which of the thirty or so games initially released my 28-year old self would have gone for, I’d say Ridge Racer V but as much as I’ve grown to appreciate it since, I reckon back then I probably wanted something different after Ridge Racer Type 4 had only arrived on PS1 a year previously, and I’d played a lot of it since then! Similar story with Tekken Tag Tournament and Tekken 3, although my interest in fighting games was on the wane anyway.

The International Superstar Soccer series evolved into a favourite on PS2 but a football game was unlikely to have been top of the list to show off my new console with, which then rules out FIFA 2001 too. TimeSplitters would also become an all-time favourite but I guess I didn’t know what it was when I was placing an advance order, and Fantavision looked spectacular but to this day I’m not sure there’s much game in there for me. As much as I’d enjoyed earlier ports of earlier games a long time before, 2D shoot ‘em ups like Gradius III and IV probably seemed like old hat in the new millennium. Dynasty Warriors 2 would definitely have been a contender but I’ve a feeling that was either announced late as a launch title – possibly after I’d placed any orders – or was a doubt, so that was something I picked up later because you don’t want a brand new console and nothing to play on it! And of the rest there’s just nothing that would have jumped out… Apart from SSX!

Right, I’m still not sure explaining why not a bunch of other games adequately explains why SSX, particularly when we’ve also established I had no interest in snowboarding! Well, I did have an interest in racing games even if I didn’t want another Ridge Racer right off the bat, and those have always been a pretty safe bet for showcasing the power of a new console! Not something you’ll be done with after a long weekend of doing nothing else either, and having just bought our first place, money was certainly tight and whatever I chose was going to be my lot for quite a while. SSX couldn’t be less like Ridge Racer either, with these insane alpine environments offering an unheard-of sense of scale, full of huge peaks and exhilarating high-speed slopes hosting white-knuckle races and wild tricks over stomach-churning jumps. And all that weather, and the fireworks, and the soundtrack, and the “extreme” characters and commentary, and the trail of your board as it cut into the snow, which you could almost physically feel a few millimetres under your feet as it visibly changed from packed and icy to powdery! Forget snowboarding – this was simply the most groundbreaking racing game since Wipeout, the most stunning game of any kind on any home computer or console to date, and I reckon I’ve just sold myself on it all over again!

And I could, no doubt, do it all over again for its sequel, SSX Tricky, which followed a year later and added more characters, more tracks and crazy gauged Uber tricks, but instead I’m going to skip forwards to October of 2003 when we got the third game in the series, and by which point – had I obsessed over lists of favourite games like I do now – either of its two predecessors would have been in with a shout! We’ll come back to that, but by now we were married and had traded-in our two-bedroom flat in East London for a three-bedroom house in our hometown of Bedford, about three hundred metres from where I’d grown up, literally across the road from where my recently-deceased Grandma had lived since not long after World War II, and on the site of the former school my auntie had gone to when I was still being taken there in a pram! Not any less rough than the area we’d just left, mind, but you live within your means and it was still home (to me at least)!

It’s funny but I can vividly remember sitting down on the Ikea sofa bed in our spare room that was part fashion studio and part man-cave, PS2 controller in-hand for the very first time, and not moving for an entire day and night playing that first game, but my outstanding memory of the third was sitting on these dreadful wooden fold-up chairs that had followed us since my wife was a student (because the sofa bed was now too far away) and playing two-player with her, which was the first and last time we’d ever do that on anything, but we played it endlessly for a while and we were both really good in the end, which still impresses me as she’d only ever played Spyro the Dragon on PS1 before that and hasn’t touched a video game since! All those hours probably explain why SSX 3 will always be a PS2 game to me though, despite me also getting it for the GameCube not long after and the Xbox a lot later too, which reminds me, the latter is where I’ve grabbed the screenshots you can see here because it’s just way easier doing so on a Series X.

My original plan here was to give this game a bit of context with some more contemporary real-life snowboarding talk but as we seem to have arrived at SSX 3 naturally without it – and I’ve probably also rambled long enough – I reckon I’ll save that for when I get to looking at Gaelco’s wonderful isometric racer Snowboard Championship someday instead! I should probably have been a bit more descriptive about the series at hand though, although I think we’ve covered the jist in a roundabout way… SSX stands for Snowboard Supercross, and as well as being a launch title for the PS2, it was also a launch title for the EA Sport Big brand. It’s a very-arcade racer built around doing big jumps and big tricks at breakneck speeds on breakneck courses, throwing everything a mountain can possibly throw at you on the way down! Whichever entry you look at – and we’ll cover subsequent ones later – there’s also a trademark physicality, and an incredible feeling of friction between you and your board and the snow, which I don’t think any other likeminded game series has ever captured; in fact, in terms of feel, I think only Wave Race 64 from 1996 has ever come close with your interaction with the water on there.

I’m possibly jumping ahead of myself now, so let’s get into SSX 3! “Smash all the boundaries in the definitive open-mountain snowboarding experience as you explore and compete on three expansive mountain peaks, striving to become the master of the mountain. Crash the free-roaming slopes and outrun the avalanches, all while hammering out sick new Uber tricks, wicked rail glides and mad stunts.” The open-mountain part was undoubtedly the headline act here, and to jump ahead of myself again, I think why I’d pick this over SSX Tricky as my favourite one, with races actively encouraging you off-piste to gain slight advantage but at risk of losing everything, and there’s so much to uncover as you go from top to bottom, seamlessly riding from one area to the next and one event type to the next as you please, on tracks designed specifically for each across the three increasingly challenging and varied peaks. On top of that, it also introduced all kinds of customisation and rewards and three levels of those Uber tricks, which I promise I’ll explain properly, along with everything else, very soon!

You can just pick single or multiplayer events from the main menu but I’m going to focus on Conquer the Mountain here, the main mode on offer, and where you’re going to unlock those events across the three peaks, earn cash to enhance your character, and generally make your way through the mass of events available! I’ll come back to those in a sec, but for now we’ll start on the first peak, where we need to complete any of its goals to be able to open up the next. The general flow is get a medal in all the race or freestyle events on the peak to be able to call out your main rival for a showdown in the Backcountry, which will be an off-piste challenge based on either a race or a freestyle jam depending on where you’ve won your medals. Beat your rival and you’ll then unlock the Peak Event, where you start at the top and head all the way down the mountain into the city below; again, it’s either a race – this time against the clock – or for points if you’re playing freestyle. Win that (which is no easy feat either way!) and you’ll not only be able to access the next peak and do it all over again but once you’re at the top, there might also be a new rival trying to take you down!

Until you get to the Rival Challenges, all the events have three heats – for races, there’s qualifying, a semi-final and a final, then the various freestyle events will have a qualifying round with two combined heats and a final. These include Slopestyle, where you need to find the best possible route for the highest trick points, while Super Pipe is a wild combination of chaining tricks and big air for points in a halfpipe, then Big Air takes flying combos to a whole other level on the piste! For any of these you can either ride your way down to your event of choice by following the big signs, or you can grab your delightfully millennial PDA from the pause menu and get transported straight to the start line! And if you just fancy exploring, you can then choose to simply bypass the start gate and choose to freeride, exploring the mountain for Big Challenges and the crystals that encourage exploration and alternate routes while you’re in regular events too, and if you complete or collect over 30% of both you’ll also be able to unlock a pass for the next peak, giving everyone the same opportunity to see everything regardless of their ability.

I think you can just collect enough cash to buy a peak pass too, although I reckon if you play enough to earn that much cash you’ll probably have got it by then anyway, and you’ll also want to save your money for all the other stuff you’ll need to style and profile your way through the game! You’ve got a choice of ten characters from the outset but at this stage it’s simply picking your favourite (or the least irritating when you’ve heard a few of them never shutting up during an event!) because everyone’s stats begin equal and low, so this is most likely where you’ll start spending first. You do this in a lodge, which you’ll also see on those big signs on the mountain, and once there you can gradually boost areas like acceleration, stability, toughness and so on. As already mentioned, SSX games are such tactile things that you’ll very quickly get a nose for what you want to improve as your riding style emerges, for example, if you like to crash through every out of bounds sign you see, you’re going to want to get more resilient among all those avalanches and rockfalls, or if you’re into the tricks, then being able to spin faster is going to let you get more of them in before you land. Hopefully!

It being pre-DLC and in-game purchases and the like, all of this cash business is very much about customising your experience and rewarding you for playing rather than any of the more egregious money grabs the likes of EA might be better known for today! That’s not to say you can’t buy all sorts though, and I guess the next thing you’ll want are a few new Uber and Super Uber tricks, which you can trigger once your adrenaline meter has been filled up by being “extreme”! Once purchased, these can be configured in a lodge, but I’ll come back to tricks shortly. I’ve never got them all but I think you can unlock or buy another twenty characters too, many of which return from the previous games, as well as custom move-sets for them, and obviously there are tons of costumes to buy if you fancy a new colour or style or just want a huge pumpkin on your head! The third peak further unlocks a load of similarly wacky new stuff, but wherever you are there’s all sorts to discover – artwork, trading cards, posters, videos…

You’ve also got EA Radio Big, where you can also unlock or buy custom playlists, and that’s a good place to jump to the soundtrack because before we do anything it’s going to be shoved in our faces, and the resident DJ is going to provide impressively dynamic “commentary” on everywhere we go and everything we do, usually for the benefit of some unseen spectator trying to find our where the action is. Together with your own rider’s incessant nonsense, some very authentic snowboarding sounds and all the environmental effects – from wild weather to branches breaking as you misjudge a jump – it’s never a lonely affair, even when you’re all alone in a snowstorm, with all those tunes to keep you company on top! There’s getting on for forty tracks here – most of which are licensed – so theres also a good chance you won’t hear the same one twice during any given play session. And it’s all fine but I don’t think it’s the game’s strongest point, although the early 2000s weren’t exactly music’s finest hour either, and that’s what you’re getting here. There’s some higher profile stuff, like Fatboy Slim, Black Eyed Peas, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queens of the Stone Age, but a lot of it is lightweight alt-pop or pop-punk or inoffensive hip-pop, maybe given the named-remix treatment, but I’d have loved something as edgy as some of the trousers you can buy instead – a bit of Beastie Boys or Megadeth or something! And where’s all the nu-metal???

Right, time we got the the game’s strongest point instead and went out for a ride! Most events are going to begin at a starting gate somewhere up the mountain, and once the countdown reaches zero you’re going to launch yourself downhill. I’d never really noticed it until I was trying to get a few screenshots to use here but there’s a lot of stuff going on all the time – regular stuff like score, time, current place and current speed, as well as your race progress and that of nearest opponents, the adrenaline meter, and not only the name of the trick you’ve just done at the bottom of the screen but also the fast-moving running score tally for your current combo and any rewards collected right above you in middle of it. It’s relentlessly busy! Surprisingly, though, none of it ever gets in the way of the action, and what action it is! While there are a bunch of different event types, each with very different objectives, riding just feels incredible whatever you’re up you, and that’s partly down to the mind-bogglingly meticulously thought-out environmental designs, and your ability to effortlessly and instinctively react to it and negotiate its different features and surfaces to maximum advantage, and partly down to the equally instinctive controls that deliver fluidity and precision to every airborne twist and turn. That said, once you’ve got a feel for how the tricks work, a bit of controlled random finger twisting is a perfectly serviceable way of building up massive combos and boosting both your adrenaline meter too, contributing towards those massive Ubers and the massive points they present, as well as the gauged speed boost it combines with.

I haven’t thought about the controls for this for a long time but just looking in the manual now does remind me that there’s a bit of reactive left-handed controller hopping demanded here that probably took a bit of practice to perfect at the outset! You ride on the left analog stick, build or check speed on up and down, left and right as normal, and that part couldn’t be more natural or immediate. However, when you’re about to jump or flip or spin, you want to wind it up first, involving crouching by pressing X or A or whatever button’s at the bottom of the controller you’re playing on, which is fine, but then you want to switch to the d-pad to start turning horizontally or vertically, and that’s in a split-second using the same thumb that’s controlling your board! It must soon feel natural or I’d be useless though, and once in the air, you’ll then be combining all of the other buttons plus the shoulder buttons to grab or tweak, and as mentioned before, you’ll then be combining all of this to create chains and combos you can hold to maximise point scoring. Just remember gravity though, and that you can’t stop a spin mid-spin just because you realise the ground is approaching a bit quick! Once your adrenaline meter is full, you can do one of your rider’s Uber tricks, which involves getting some height and tweaking one of your basic grabs, and do four of those (within a certain time period) to spell out U.B.E.R. and you can use the same button combination to unleash an even bigger Super Uber for some serious high-stakes scoring!

There are both manmade ways to take off and do tricks, such as ramps and grind bars, as well as more natural means, such as piled up snow or fallen branches, or even the odd rooftop or construction vehicle! Generally, if it looks like you can jump off something, you probably can, so you’re constantly scanning the horizon for a new launch point, or a gap you’ve noticed that the guy in front hasn’t, or a tunnel entrance, or a huge window you might be able to smash through if you can somehow get high enough… You might be on a snowy mountain but there’s plenty more to hold your attention on the way down too, whether some magnificent alpine vista or beautifully-lit cityscape in the distance, or the more immediate prospect of an avalanche or rogue blizzard restricting your visibility to a white-knuckle level before sunbeams start poking through and suddenly the whole world below is open to you again!

The graphics here have aged remarkably well, and actually it’s only really the FMV-style animated cutscenes and static stuff like the lodge shops that look a bit rough around the edges on a great big modern TV! The draw distance is what you’d expect of a racer today, the animation is up there with the best of the fighting genre, and apart from the occasional bit of tearing, SSX 3’s illustrated-realism was exactly the art-style to choose if they wanted a bit of longevity! The biggest impact might have belonged to its original predecessor, but even three games in, as far I’m I’m concerned there was still no better way to show off the PS2 at the time. And the speed!!! With all that friction and tactility it can often be nothing short of terrifying! The SSX series always loved its fireworks too, and there’s loads of them whenever track space allows, as well as birds flying and snow flurries and the imprint you and all the other riders have left behind on a truly living mountain everywhere you look.

I’ve always thought of SSX as a racer, and given the choice on the way down the mountain, I’ll always follow the sign in that direction over half-pipes or similar, but either way the opponent AI shouldn’t be underestimated for also providing plenty of longevity when your wife’s decided she doesn’t play video games after all! Obviously, the freestyle events are about score, and very much a solo experience against a target that’s realistic and challenging enough but ultimately abstract to what you’re doing. Works fine if that’s your thing though, even if the ideal scenario is a real and equally matched person sitting next to you. Solo races, however, are positioned just right, all the way through the heats and final across the three peaks, and will keep you going for ages whether you’re just trying to make it through them all or trying to improve what you’ve done before, which is almost equally compelling. Your opponents will be aggressive, and right out of the gate when you’re all bunched up there’ll be punches being thrown in all directions, and there’s plenty of cat-calling happening as you pass each other on the way down too!

I’m not sure whether to consider the courses themselves as your friend or an extra competitor to worry about but probably a bit of both! Before you make it through even the first peak though, you’re going to have to have established a degree of mastery over its sprawling descent to come first, and even more so if you’re trying to set records… If only we’d have been properly online back then! The final course on each peak is a real test of endurance as well as your connection to that area, clocking in at around twelve minutes on each of the first two but nearer half an hour on the third, as you do the entire mountain in one go, with all the highs and lows and twists and turns that entails until you finally nail it, which will be by the skin of your teeth, if you’ve been really lucky with everything it’s just thrown at you!

I’ve said for years that nothing since has nailed the feeling of skiing like Horace Goes Skiing did on the ZX Spectrum, and likewise nothing has done the same for snowboarding or even for snow itself like SSX did, right up to and beyond SSX 3, in fact, because SSX on Tour, which followed this one in 2005, is another absolute blast, this time putting more emphasis on custom characters as well as introducing skiing, even if it’s not quite Horace! Totally different game on the PlayStation Portable – more like a cut-down version of SSX 3 – but a proper showcase for that system too. The rebooted SSX on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was also an impressive feat back in 2012, and had that online stuff we were missing before, but took itself a bit too seriously for my taste, although I’ve just noticed it staring down at me from my game shelves so maybe I’ll give it another go as it’s been a while… But let me conclude on SSX 3 first though, and it’s easy because – as you might have noticed – this isn’t just my favourite game in the series, or even just my favourite game on PS2, but it’s one of my top twenty favourite games of all time; number fourteen, to be precise, sandwiched between Super Sprint and Demon’s Tilt! Interestingly, both of those rely on “feel” a lot too, but I don’t think anything else feels quite like this!

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