YMMV / SSX

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: 3 featured a Product Placement in the form of dnL, a lime-lemon flavored 7 Up variant that contained caffeine and came in a clear bottle. ^{For comparison...} 7 Up has a lemon-lime flavor, no caffeine, and comes in a green bottle. Additionally, the dnL fluid had an odd shade of green, while 7 Up's fluid is clear. A lot of people (particularly international players, it would appear) were unaware that dnL was a real drink at the time; they thought the ad was a parody of 7 Up. Apparently, even the testers didn't know about it, as it was not distributed in Canada; because of this, numerous bug reports were written concerning the dnL billboards.
• Ascended Fanon: Possibly, as there was a lot of fan fiction depicting Griff as the arrogant jerk portrayed in SSX 2012, even before On Tour's release.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: SSX Blur was a Wii-exclusive entry that used motion controls for its tricks and steering. It turned out that the number of fans who wanted to play using relatively unproven motion controls and people who wanted to play a snowboarding game whose motion controls weren't very reflective of snowboarding was not a large group. The game's failure would then put the series on ice for the next 5 years.
• Awesome Music: These games have tons of it, mainly in the form of funky or just plain adrenaline-pumping electronica. On Tour didn't use that kind of music too much, though the soundtrack is good in its own right.
  • "Shake What Ya Mama Gave Ya"
  • "Gin and Sin"
    • As if that wasn't awesome enough, here's a 15-minute extended version straight from the game files!
  • "Song for Dot"
  • The series' Signature Song, "It's Tricky" by Run–D.M.C..
  • "Go" by Andy Hunter.
  • Also used by Mass Effect 2, Sunrise, and others, "Happiness". Meaningful Name much?
  • "Finished Symphony" by Hybrid, the absolutely amazing piece that plays during the "Untracked" level. Both the level and the music are the perfect reward for making it to the end of the game.
• Breather Level:
  • Serenity in the 2012 game counts. While it does have a bottomless pit very early on, the rest of the stage is very forgiving and very long. This high score potential has made it a very popular run for online trick contests.
  • Chapter 6 in each rider's Trick Book in Tricky. Chapter 5 includes very complex tricks to perform, often requiring several careful rotations and switching from one stance to the next. In contrast, Chapter 6 involves each rider's über tricks, which only need a full boost meter, making the completion of the book a piece of cake once you reach it.
• Broken Base: The Deadly Descents in SSX 2012. While some critics didn't like them, others like IGN called them the highlight of the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Psymon and Eddie are the only new characters from Tricky to reappear in the later games, though Eddie wouldn't reappear until SSX 2012 and Psymon appeared in every game since Tricky.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Moby Jones and Zoe Payne have quite a big Swede fanbase.
• Moment of Awesome: Griff bails on the team and sets up his own. How does Zoe react? She heads to where he set a trick record and at the start of the event does something not even James Bond would attempt and grinds a helicopter. You heard right, she grinds a helicopter in flight, bagging two million points to Griff's two thousand in the opening seconds and ending with nearly five million at the end.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • "SUPERRRRRRRRRR... UUUUUUBEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRR!!! (Uber Zone... 3... 3... 3...)" Anyone who's played SSX 3 knows this meant you could go crazy with your Übertricks with no regards for the consequences (read: bailing) for a limited time.
  • *jazzy music sting* "MONSTER TRICK!!" Doing a specific uber combined with a specific rotation resulted in a Monster Trick bonus in SSX 3. A Superman with a triple backflip resulted in 10,000 points being added onto the move, for example, and these tricks are vital in getting Platinum-level scores in the game.
  • "Radio Big, back again..."
  • From Tricky: "Trick-aaaaay! HUH!" This meant that you were one step closer to having unlimited Übertricks for the rest of the race.
    • Once you fill your Tricky meter, Rahzel chimes in with '"T-R-I-C-K-Y equals SUPER d-d-DUPER boost!" along with an added siren that basically says "You've earned it — go nuts."
    • It's so awesome, even the Darker and Edgier 2012 game still plays part of the main verse once you fill the Tricky bar to highlight that it's time to really let loose.
• Older Than They Think: Many familiar elements of SSX are pulled directly from the real-life sport of boardercross, a rather niche Olympic winter sport. Like the games, boardercross races take place over multiple heats of head-to-head races (4 riders per race) across linear courses filled with high banked turns and jumps, and knockdowns are not exactly encouraged, but do happen (no boost award for doing so, however). The races even have a starting gate that drops like in the games.
• The Scrappy:
  • Viggo Rolig from SSX 3, who received a lot of hate in the Merqury City fansite due to his voice actor, replacing JP as the "euro" representative, flat personality, and most of his character traits revealed in his character profile being Informed Attributes. He has been phased out of the series along with Nate in favor of Allegra and Griff.
  • Sid from SSX On Tour, though it's mostly a Die for Our Ship thing due to him being paired with Kaori and leaving her canon love interest Mac in the cold.
  • Marty from the PAL version of SSX Tricky replaces Mac. While he's the exact same character as Mac, many fans including those in the PAL region dislike him and just would've rather had Mac.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The rewind in SSX 2012. No other SSX game had these, and while they can keep you alive bringing you out of a bottomless pit, your opponents are unaffected and continue their run in real-time, meaning you're continuously losing time even if you do get back on two feet.
  • The bottomless pits in SSX 2012 are this in general, as falling in them no longer resets your rider back to the track but actually ends your run if you don't have enough rewind to get out of them. This definitely broke up the momentum of the game and basically meant your run had to be perfect.
• Sequelitis: The fanbase may disagree as to whether or not Tricky or 3 was the best game, but it's generally agreed that the series started getting stale with On Tour, which was still a good game but dialed back the character and zaniness of the franchise. Blur, the series' entry on the Wii, brought back the larger-than-life personalities but polarized fans with its motion controls, while SSX 2012 went Darker and Edgier in such a manner that left fans cold (even after it was toned down from the original Deadly Descents trailer). The franchise has been dormant since.
• Shipping: Seriously. The second game added a Relationship Values system where each character had friends and enemies, which fueled the shipping. Mac/Kaori and Zoe/Moby are two of the more popular couples.
• Shocking Moments:
  • "... damn, did you see how many flips he just got in there? What was it, five? Six?"
  • Grinding an airborne helicopter. Do this and you've won and have enough points for every trick event in the game.
  • Some of the absolutely insane Übertricks you can perform in Tricky, which include but are not limited to pretending to saw your body in half at the waist with your snowboard, doing the Worm, and breakdancing.
• Song Association: SSX Tricky and "It's Tricky" (originally a hit for Run–D.M.C. in 1986).
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: SSX Tricky. The original SSX was a great launch title that showed off what the PlayStation 2 was capable of, but there were a great many issues with it, such as a flat personality and overly-demanding tracks, especially early on. Tricky had a much gentler learning curve, introduced the revolutionary Ubertrick system, and was injected with tons of appealing party personality.
• That One Level: The Deadly Descents in SSX (2012). Each one is packed with common snowboarding hazards (trees, ice, whiteouts, rocks, etc) which makes getting down the mountain a hugely frustrating affair. Several game reviewers note that these tracks drag the game down, but others have said they're the highlight.
  • For the original SSX and SSX Tricky, the most feared course by many is Tokyo Megaplex, an amazing technicolor pinball snowboarding complex with difficult-to-maneuver obstacles in your face at almost all times, thin twisting upper railings and walkways requiring very stringent balancing and riding to avoid falling off, button-activated switch gates all over the place and tons of spots where it's easy to get yourself stuck and force resetting yourself, losing boost and the ability to perform Uber tricks in the process. What's more, if you make even one costly mistake and wipe out - which is almost a certainty considering the aforementioned large amount of obstacles you have to avoid - your opponents will catch up to you in almost no time flat due to the level's absolute dearth of lengthy shortcuts.
    • At the very least, Tokyo Megaplex is only really difficult in the race events, and is somewhat of a Breather Level for the Showoff trick events, providing many opportunities for big air and long grind combos. The same cannot be said for Aloha Ice Jam, the final level from the original SSX game, which is difficult in both the Race and Showoff events. Tight turns around almost every corner, awkward shortcuts and sudden jumps and drop-offs that reset you behind the pack if you fall into them. It's also a very short course, and while the Showoff medal scores are lower than the others to compensate, achieving them is still tough thanks to the dearth of ramps to trick off of and fewer score multipliers, which are pretty far out-of-the-way.
  • A couple of Peak 3's Freestyle events in SSX 3 are very tough:
    • Kick Doubt is, without a doubt, the hardest Freestyle event in the game. It's comparatively short next to the previous peaks' Slope Style events, not leaving you much time to surmount Psymon's insanely-high gold score requirements, which essentially mandate going out of your way to hit at least a couple 10x multiplier-enhanced Ubertricks. These all require stringent timing, boosting and accuracy to reach, especially whilst maintaining a high combo. It's not uncommon for even seasoned players to have to replay this track several times to get the gold medal.
    • Much-2-Much is the final Big Air event, and not only is maintaining your combo throughout the run almost essential to getting the gold medal, it also has several ramps that kill your run and your combo if you don't approach them in just the right way and time your jumps in very tight windows. Worse still, the course is littered with large crags and rocky outcroppings that cause you to bail if you even so much as brush up against them, which can spell doom for your run if you hit a ramp in the wrong direction.

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