Wii’s SSX Blur brings snowy slopes to Houston game rooms
For those of us stuck in the balmy Bayou City because of classes, virtual reality makes for a great vacation destination. As the Houston heat creeps back onto campus, it might be time to fire up the old Nintendo for some refreshing snowboard supercross.
SSX Blur, recently released by Electronic Arts Sports for the Wii, provides thrills, chills and snowboard spills aplenty for the powder-deprived. The newest installment in the critically-acclaimed SSX series, Blur takes off in a new direction that is novel and refreshing at first, but soon starts to show the limits of its technology.
Aesthetically, Blur has a cheesy pop cartoon feel that keeps up the high energy of the game and masks the Wii’s limited visual processing power. Gamers get their pick of avatars to hit the slopes, which is no easy task considering the selection. A dozen men and women hailing from destinations as far-ranging as Japan and Australia fill out the stable of choices. The characters are brightly colored and improbably dressed.
The mountainsides are unnaturally pristine. Music full of retro techno glory pumps throughout the courses changing magically with the actions of the player. Although overuse of the terms “uber” and “groovy” in big, technicolor banners across the screen severely undermines the sense of achievement they are supposed to impart, the out-of-this-world slope action speaks for itself. SSX Blur is one wild, goofy ride.
This stylizing is like the rest of the SSX series, but what revolutionizes this installment is the smart application of the Wii’s motion-sensing capabilities.
In Blur, the Wii Nunchuk extension is the gamer’s best friend, enabling a surprisingly tight control over the movements of the zooming avatar. Players control basic moves with the Nunchuk’s joystick, but jumping and carving with the board for more precise turns are both motion-sensitive. The result feels very natural, almost as if the Nunchuk hand is actually tracing the avatar’s path down the mountainside. Twist the hand to turn left or right, tip forward to speed up and add a flick of the wrist to launch your boarder into the blue — once again, Nintendo’s overhaul of its game controller appears quite triumphant.
Unfortunately, the learning curve for Blur can be a bit steep. The game’s tutorial mode does a decent job of familiarizing players with the basic controls of the game, but when it comes to the finer points of doing fun stuff like flips and spins, trial and error are a bit more effective than the in-game instructions.
Gone are the days of button-mashing glory. Instead wild gesticulating with the Wiimote governs the snowboarder’s mid-air maneuvers. Be warned, however: Getting the boarder off the ground and spinning around is one thing, but avoiding the hysterical slow-motion faceplant in the snow is quite another. Sometimes the frustration and unresponsiveness of the trick controls overshadow the elation of basic boarding.
In addition, the difficulty of mastering the game’s most impressive line of mid-air maneuvers, known as Uber Tricks, can be a major turnoff for all but the most dedicated snowboard game fanatics. Uber Tricks involve the Wiimote, requiring the gamer to hold down a button and trace specific shapes in the air. This is a good idea in theory, but the game’s ability to recognize these symbols is quite inconsistent. A difficult game is tolerable when skills can reasonably improve, but SSX Blur makes this process downright frustrating. Whether these glitches are a result of poor programming or mechanical failure is difficult to determine, but these problems are always a risk when playing with wireless controllers.
SSX Blur has its rewards and genuine triumphs, but glitchy controls always have a way of ruining the moment. While the record scratching and music halting when you wipeout may be amusing at first, but after a few dozen times, the fist-shaking motion needed to pick avatars back up will become more and more genuine. Still, the game is not a complete failure, and anyone looking for that snowy escape on a balmy afternoon might find the outrageous peaks to be the perfect distraction from a problem set.
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