I do not know. Nor do I care. I love it. For about a two month period in '04 I was addicted to SSX3; the open world mountain that you could traverse from peak to base was unbelieveably cool. Now it is 2008 and Ubisoft has released Shawn White Snowboarding (using a modified version of the Assassin Creed engine) and it had been posed by a few people that this could be a successor to SSX3, a game widely considered to be the best snowboarding game ever.
Shawn White is out now and hasn't been recieved as well as speculated. Stupid prognosticators are always wrong. I'm not one to buy bad or poorly made games, not now at least. I did buy Chromehounds during the Xbox 360 first Summer drought though. Poor purchase aside I saw Shawn White and it gave me the desire to play SSX3 again. So this past weekend I scoured the local Gamestops in both Bloomington and New Albany, IN with the goal of finding the five year old game. Just finding it would have been fantastic, but to find a working copy, that actually had its instuction manual (I never understand why people trade-in a game without the instruction manual. There is a place for you to put it for crying out loud. Granted I don't need it, but I hate opening a game box and seeing a huge empty space) would have been astounding. Amazingly I found a copy for the low price of $6.99.
When I arrived back at my apartment I began playing and even after five years of innovation in the Videogame Industry SSX3 holds up well. There was almost no re-learning of the controls; it felt like I had played the game just the day before. This is remarkable since most game's controls do not stick with me after I've moved onto a new genre with a different control scheme. The visuals do not hold-up as well as the controls, but that is to be expected. When you play SSX though you aren't paying that much attention to the scenery as you are pulling off your next ridiculous trick. This should go without saying, but if you haven't tried SSX3, or it's predecessor SSX Tricky, you need to give it a shot. I've never snowboarded a day in my life so knowledge of snowboarding isn't necessary.
In other news it looks as if I'll be advancing to my Fantasy Football championship game. I currently lead the #1 seed 83-63 with each of us having a player left in tomorrow night's MNF game, so barring a miracle I will win. Should I win, my next opponent, who looks to have rapped up his game too, will be a guy with a monster team; in particular his running backs who are beastly to say the least.
So tonight I will preemptively bask in the glory of my upset and play some SSX3 until the wee hours in the morning since my only classes this week are my two finals on Tuesday; starting at 8 am though. Have a happy Sunday.
