SSX is Trying to Kill You (In a Good Way)

Remember how fun and carefree SSX was? It was simultaneously a better snowboard sim than Amped, and a better cartoon than Snowboard Kids. But much like Pet Semetary's Miko Hughes, raised from the dead by the forces of a cat graveyard, SSX is not the game you remember. It's darker, more twisted... Maybe evil? But that's what makes it so exciting.

Stop reading and watch this exclusive SSX trailer first. It's pretty freakin' sick.

SSX gives you all the tools and skills needed to pull off amazing tricks, but its mountains are not your friends. They're huge, foreboding titans that you have to conquer and tame, not ride. Freezing temperatures, dark caves, avalanches, and sheer cliff faces are all here to sign your death certificate. Most recently we tried to survive in the Patagonias, South America's deadliest range. The mountains are littered with crashed aircraft. The passengers are nowhere to be seen, likely perished, devoured by the mountain, or a Uruguayan rugby team. You, armed with a glide suit, have to leap across chasms, defying gravity to make it down the mountain in one piece.

These missions, based around different ways to make you dead, are what set SSX apart from its previous versions, and any other snowboarding game.

And above it all, using the chaos for their own adrenaline-junky pleasure, are the riders. You'll recognize them, they're the faces you remember from the first time you ever pulled off a "tricky" combo. But like everything in SSX, the riders are edgier, more modern. Eddie is here, ushering in a new golden age for white boy afros. Kaori is less Otaku-bait, more Mirror's Edge. And Psymon… well he's kind of creepy.

Unfortunately you have to wait a couple weeks longer for SSX. February 28 is the new release date. But I'm confident you can survive that long. The real question is how long you'll survive after.

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