SSX Blur

When EA announced SSX Blur, understandably many felt a little apprehensive about the series making its way to Wii. Afterall, with the system being touted as for people who had never played games before, how would a game like SSX, a franchise notorious for being one for the more hardcore of gamers, translate? Thankfully, EA have ignored the ‘simple games’ stigma that Wii has been subject to and even given it a bit of a kick up the behind (hopefully pushing towards the label disappearing) – SSX Blur is compromised for nobody.

Immediately it’s not difficult to tell that this game is one of the most challenging to be found on Wii to date, and thus it is probably a dream come true for those people wanting more of a challenge than the likes of Wii Sports and Wario Ware: Smooth Moves offer. The competition in all game modes is fierce, the track design can be vicious and the controls don’t help at all, and not because they are unwieldy. This is one game where the tutorial mode should be the first thing you’re clicking on…

 

Indeed, it will probably take a majority of players a fair amount of time before they can grasp every aspect of the game’s controls, as they’ve all been completely re-done for Wii. The nunchuk is mainly reserved for movement, while the remote handles tricks. Acceleration and deceleration is controlled with the analogue stick. To jump, a swift upward motion of the ‘chuk is all that is needed. To carve (that’s ‘swerve’ to us non-snowboarding proles), the player merely has to twist the nunchuk left or right, with the analogue stick being used for a little extra control on the turn (though you can adjust how much motion sensing and how much the joystick are used, from entirely motion sensing to entirely stick). While this might sound straightforward enough, it actually takes some time to get used to as you have no central point of reference for movement as you would with an analogue stick, and for the first 10 – 20 minutes it feels like more of a nuisance than anything else. The less patient will switch to entirely analogue control before they are used to the default control, but we urge you to stick it out, as once you have grasped it it’s sublime, supremely smooth and instinctive. Going back to analogue controls feels alien.

As mentioned, the remote is given the task of controlling tricks, such as spins and flips. Flicking it to the left will result in an anti-clockwise spin and the opposite for a right flick, while an upward or downward flick gives a backwards or forwards flip respectively. This pretty much works all of the time, but there is a temptation to simply wave the remote around in the air during big jumps, which takes away any feeling of grace that could have been attributed to it. The nunchuk is also used for mid-air grabs (hold down Z while off the ground and twist the nunchuk in any direction), though this was one element of control that we did not like – each direction of nunchuk movement is supposed to be mapped to one type of grab, but we would do entirely different movements and get the same trick. It’s a letdown compared to the rest of the control, though shaking the remote and nunchuk to recover from a fall isn’t much better.