Pros: It's an SSX game.
Cons: Bad controls, cartoon characters, bad music, bad interface.
The bottom line: SSX Blur is all the previous SSX titles warmed over and Nintendo-ised. With an impossible-to-use control scheme, don't even give this one a rental.
I'm a total SSX bigot. I love the games with their over-the-top tricks and great characters. I can even forgive SSX On Tour for reversing half the controls and putting a crappy soundtrack in the game. So when I heard about a new game in the franchise - SSX Blur - I was excited. My excitement was somewhat tempered when I discovered that it's only available on the Nintendo Wii. And my tempered excitement turned to sorrow and almost anger when I played it.

Developers have this habit of taking ostensibly great games and dumbing them down into a super-happy-sunshine mode for Nintendo hardware that even 5-year-olds would find offensive. And true to form, with SSX Blur, EA have done just that. Gone are the edgy characters with great game modelling, and in come what are basically cartoons. Where you used to be able to associate with the characters, whether it was lusting for Elise, wanting to be able to snowboard for real like JP or Mac, or hating Psymon, now you just look at them all and think "awww - how cute". Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Gone is the techno and dance soundtrack and in comes something from saturday morning children's TV. The soundtrack is a hand-picked playskool special.

And gone, apparently, is the originality because SSX Blur is nothing but tracks from the previous SSX titles warmed over. EA have gone to extremes to point out that they've re-skinned the tracks from the old games to the point where they're unrecognisable from their original forms. This is pure marketing nonsense; if you've played any of the previous games, you'll instantly recognise all the tracks and courses. They barely look any different apart from the cartoon makeover.

In fact the entire game is basically SSX3 dumbed done to Mario levels. Same tracks, same tricks, same maps, same mountains, same characters albeit now in cartoon mode. Yet somehow, given the "next gen" hardware, SSX Blur manages to look worse on the Wii than SSX3 did on the PS2. The on-screen interface is truly awful with the trick-meter (sorry, the Groove Meter) taking up nearly a quarter of the screen on the right. Gone is the subtle, easy-to-read trick meter of the good old days and in comes a giant neon yellow cartoon graphic with a huge star on top that looks like a funfair 'test your strength' stall.

EA have heavily over-done the speed and motion blur effects in SSX Blur to the point of some areas looking like they've been rendered through a fisheye lens, the distortion is so bad. This detracts from the game because your eye is always attracted to bizarre colour and geometry distortions at the edges of the screen, enough to make you look to see what it was just long enough to lose what little control you had over the character on-screen.

So what about the sound effects and music? Hooked up to my 5.1 audio components, it sounded muddy and confused. The sound effects never seemed to come from the center of the screen, always swishing back and forth. It's like they've just discovered stereo and went crazy with the left-to-right audio pan just because they could. The ambient sounds are good, and you'll get used to them fast because the music is just awful. We still have Radio Big with that great DJ, but the incidental music doesn't lend itself to snowboarding or skiing. You'll soon find your way to the preferences screen to turn it off and be left with the swooshing sound effects and ambient noises.

Okay then - there must be at least one redeeming feature surely? What about the controls? The SSX franchise always managed to make pulling off the most insane stunts strangely easy with a simple combination of stick positions and button presses. Even the mis-step with SSX On Tour where they reversed the trick-cancel and uber-trick buttons was something I got used to in time. But on the Wii, you end up having to hold both the nunchuck controller and the wiimote. You carve and jump with the nunchuck and use the wiimote to do spins, flips and tricks. The problem is, like so many other Wii games, they suffer terribly from transport delay in the controllers. ie. there's a barely-perceptible but very annoying delay between moving the control and anything happening in-game. With SSX Blur this is amplified by the speed of the game, and the nunchuck controller makes it all but impossible to ride the snow in a straight line. You're always turning one way or another so lining up for jumps and stunts is frustratingly difficult to the point where you'll want to throw the controllers at your TV. In your other hand, you spin, wiggle and twist the wiimote like some demented harry-potter wannabe in a vain attempt to pull off tricks. EA claim that the uber tricks are especially rewarding when you pull them off. I believe they walked up to the the fine line between "rewarding" and "frustrating" and then sprinted right on over it well into "frustrating" territory. With previous SSX titles you could master the controls and get on with the business of actually playing the game within a matter of minutes. With SSX Blur you'll be winding yourself into oblivion for hours just trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It's nothing like the pick-up-and-play games of previous SSX versions.

So EA have dumbed down and warmed-over SSX3 in the gameplay but they've made the controls so difficult as to be basically unusable. Snowboarding and skiing games most definitely do not lend themselves to the Wii's new world order of gaming controllers.

In days gone by, I would defend Nintendo in any games console argument. The N64 was the peak of their prowess and Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were the pinnacle of Nintendo gaming. They started to lose me with the Gamecube though - fantastic hardware plagued by idiotic children's games and not enough content for the serious gamer. Now the Wii ducked out of the hardware arms race altogether, I can't defend Nintendo any more. With EA pandering to Nintendo's rose-spectacled view of gaming with drivel like SSX Blur, in my opinion Nintendo have sealed their fate as the next Sega. Expect them to become a software house in the next couple of years with only the Gameboy as their sole remaining piece of hardware.

SSX Blur has so much heritage in the series to build on and in this incarnation it's been totally ignored in favour of a nintendo-ised game plagiarised with content from earlier games.

I've read reviews elsewhere on the net that give SSX Blur glowing, high-point reviews and I have to ask those reviewers "what were you looking at?" It's interesting to see how the videos and screenshots on the IGN review have been cropped so as to eliminate the awful interface overlays around the screen. On some shots you can just see the edge of the trick-meter on the right, but I suspect they didn't want to show the whole screen for fear of counterpointing their reviews.

I truly don't understand how anyone can play SSX Blur then give it a good review. It's just a terrible, terrible game. EA need to make it right with something extreme on the PS3 otherwise the SSX franchise has nailed it's own coffin shut. I really, really wanted to love this game but the re-hash of a two-generations-old game coupled with the impossible controller system left me cold.