As a fan of the SSX series I found myself eager to play SSX Blur 0n the Wii when I first heard about it. The potential that motion control bears is incredible, and the extreme sport of snowboarding seems like a perfect application for it. The result is a frustrating and overly confusing control scheme that will lead to your failure many times over. Let the frustration begin.
With the nunchuck’s tilt function, you will control your characters body movement. This is particularly difficult, as the nunchuk has a poor motion response in general. In the options menu, you have the choice to switch from the tilt to the analog stick. I suggest you do this immediately to save yourself a ton of grief. Once you get the hang of the overly sensitive body movement, it’s time to move lower, down to your snowboard. Controlling your board/skis takes place entirely on the Wii Remote, jumping with vertical motion and performing tricks with different gestures. Trying to do these tricks and other motions while maintaining balance is an extremely difficult task. This is about the time you slam your face in to the ground over and over again. This will recur both in game, and in real life.
As I mentioned earlier, tricks are executed using simple gestures and button combos. Simple enough, I’d say. The real trick here is landing that oh-so-sick Fakie+900+Rodeo+Stalefish. It’s difficult to land tricks, as it’s built around timing that doesn’t always work like it should. However, when you finally pull off a trick, your Turbo and Uber-Trick meter are filled. After you finally build up enough juice, you’ll be to pull off a stellar Uber-Trick – a ludicrous, but amazing looking trick – but trying to pull these off is like trying to nail jell-o to a tree. It’s really, really hard. Plan on wailing and flailing as you try, and fail repeatedly, to get a successful Uber-Trick. The mechanic is simply broken. Your movement must be so precise that a single error, noticeable or not, will have you wipe out instead of landing an insane move. While in the air, you’re to make certain gestures affiliated with their respective Uber-Trick, but there’s no reticle or icon on the screen to aid you. It’s brutally frustrating. After my first two one-hour sessions with Blur I found myself pulling off awesome looking moves and really flying down the tracks like a pro. I was winning all of my trick competitions, time trials and races, but not without effort. I still, however, have not mastered the Uber-Trick. Using simple gestures like “Left, Right” and “Z” patterns are simple enough, but bigger and better moves are nearly impossible, what with multiple loops and other moves that will help your neighbors confirm their suspicion that yes, you have lost your mind. Eventually, I just stopped trying and stuck with what I knew.
That said, patient gamers who are willing to take the time and effort to learn the game will find themselves a rich and rewarding experience. Casual gamers, and especially non gamers should stay very far away from this game. It’s not user friendly at all, and anyone not passionate about the game will easily be scared away. SSX Blur is a very fast, very gorgeous game. The colors and lighting effects create a really great ambiance that reflect the soundtrack really well. Primarily electronica, a genre I despise, Blur’s soundtrack is hypnotic and serene when the scene is calm, and fast paced when the action escalates. I found myself calmly carving my way down the mountain more than once just to look at the scenery and listen to the music.
With a variety of modes across a huge mountain, with multiple riding trails, you’ll have plenty to do, with a ton of characters, each with a whole batch of stuff to unlock. SSX Blur is, in whole, a decent snowboarding/skiing game. There’s a lot to do, and more to achieve, but the brutally marred control scheme prevents a lot of fun from ever taking place. It’s a shame, considering how fun multiplayer would be otherwise, in one of the best looking Wii games to date. It’s just too complex of a game for anyone to understand without making a huge effort to understand, and personally, after I had learned the controls, I didn’t care anymore. I wanted to be as far away from this game as possible. This kind of flaw really limits Blur’s potential audience. This game really wipes out, and by the time it recovers, the race is already over and it failed to qualify. Sorry, EA BIG, let’s see a sequel done right please.
SSX is my all time favorite game series. I’ve purchased and beaten SSX Tricky and On Tour, and I’m still conquering the mountain on SSX3. I actually bought SSX Blur for Wii before we owned the Wii console. I’m sorry to say that I am so disappointed with the game I had actually considered pitching it.
I haven’t gotten very far with it, but the characters don’t look anything like their counterparts in the other games. Our family favorites are Zoe, Kaori, and Mac, none of which we can recognize in Blur. Also, I haven’t heard any of them talk. The banter between the characters always cracks me up, but so far the characters have been completely silent. What a huge disappointment. I’m also disappointed to be snowboarding on the same tracks that I’ve been playing on for years. Yawn!
I do enjoy throwing snowballs and I like the details of the characters getting covered in snow. Unfortunately, that’s all I like to this point. I don’t even want to go further in the game because it is such a complete let down. Compared to the other SSX games, this one is watered down from the music to the characters and scenery.
On the other hand, my husband likes the game. He never got into the SSX series, but has started to play Blur. Go figure….
“Our family favorites are Zoe, Kaori, and Mac, none of which we can recognize in Blur.”
That REALLY made me mad. Thanks for the comment, I agree pretty much entirely. This game was a knife in the heart… I really thought SSX could be something on this, but now I’m looking forward to the inevitable PS3 mountain-rider.