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Sorry about the recent maunderings about topics that have absolutely nothing at all to do with games. Sigh. Blogger has this really cool little tool for adding entries to your blogs without going through all the usual goat-rodeo. Very cool idea, but the damned thing is buggier than a carton of ladybugs. That, coupled with my sleep deprivation, makes for a just a spot of trouble. (I heard that, Ufie! Laugh it up, fuzzball!) I've been accidentally posting everything I have been posting to all three blogs here. Whoopsie!

Back to games! I'm in the middle of playing Futurama for Playstation 2. See GamerDad for all the gory details sometime next week.

The MomGamer meets Gamerdad.com

Big news! The Momgamer has joined the contributors of Gamerdad. That just means more MomGamer goodness to go 'round.

Besides this site, you can see the MomGamer on Grrlgamer, and weekly on Gamerdad.

Coming Attractions: Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness hits Grrlgamer, and we weigh in on Kingdom Hearts and the wonders of Krull for the Gamerdad next week.

I won't be posting the same content in both places (though some of it might make it's way back here), so make sure to hit them all for all the MomGamer you can stand! ;)

Been panting at screenshots and waiting ever-so-patiently for the disks, and it's almost time! To help celebrate the release of SSX 3 in October, we dredged around in the archives and found my original review of Tricky.

SSX Tricky
It's TRICKY to rock around....

Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Canada
ESRB Rating: E
Reviewed Platforms: Xbox, PS2

I nearly bought a PS2 of my own just because of the original version this game. This is the fantasy baseball of snowboarding games. Other games are trammeled by the restraints of the real world. Yes, it is nice to barrel down the slope and do the stuff you saw on the games, but I don’t play games for reality, I play them to escape. This fits the bill nicely.

For sheer beautiful environments and the pure thrill of serious shredding, nothing since then has come really close. I have seen Amped, which is a beautiful, very realistic rendering of real mountain slopes. SSX goes right over the top. Who would drag a giant iceberg to Hawaii and then carve Aloha Ice Jam through it? Or build the giant pinball machine that is Tokyo Megaplex? Or blow a course through the middle of a city like Mercury City Meltdown? The courses are outrageous. And they do the hardware proud. I never saw any of the frame-rate drop problems other reviewers wrote about elsewhere, but to be brutally frank, I never ended up at the back of the pack in the Alaska course, either.

This is not just a retread of the previous version. Just because the names are the same, don’t think you know anything about the courses. You start out in a new course, but once you win that, you think, “Here I am, back in Snowdream.” Not so, I’m afraid. Same name, same silly snow dragons, but the course is completely unrecognizable. The same held true for all the courses. Only the names and themes are the same. It is a whole new ballgame.

Probably the best example of what I am talking about is the new Uber Trick system. As you run the race and accomplish tricks, you accumulate boost, which is measured on a sort of weird meter up the side of the screen. If you do enough tricks successfully, or do something fabulous, you can fill up your boost meter, and at that point, you get regaled with some flash-back inducing old Eighties rap, and you have until the big red thing on the top of the meter stops spinning (20 seconds) to find a ramp or something to get enough air to set off an Uber Trick. These are insane, over-the-top moves like flying on your board like Superman or twirling it around your neck. If you manage six of these in a race you have unlimited boost for the rest of the run and can do as many of these tricks as you can land.

This turned out to be interesting. The tricks are fun. There is more than one Uber trick per person, so it isn’t the case of pulling off the same thing six times in the level. The rap got annoying, particularly as my son got very good at the game and was doing this all the time. The tricks will drop your jaw, particularly in replay.

And this segues to one of the biggest additions to the gameplay in this version – the Rivalry system. Each character starts out with a pre-set “relationship” with the other characters in the game. Then, as you play, how you play affects other people’s rating of you. If you run people over, smack them, cut them off, or do other dastardly things, they hate you more, and you can get pointed comments from them in between races. Eventually, people who were neutral or even friendly can become enemies, and will do their best to get in your way. On the other hand, if you run a clean race, people don’t hate you.

For example, I started off with my favorite character, Elise. Her verbiage and her “tracts of land” annoy me, but she is one of the best-balanced characters in the old game, so I learned to ignore her. In this case, I came out of the box with an enemy named Marisol (another blonde model-type) so when we were on the course together and she had a chance, she would do something to delay me if she could. Other characters range from being friendly to neutral.

All in all, I don’t like the system. For one thing, it starts off with prejudices, so even though I run clean races and don’t want to get into it with people, there are people gunning for me from the start. Also, it doesn’t distinguish between being bad at the game and active malice, so if you just suck (as you are apt to in the beginning), you can harm your relationships with the other players without meaning to by accidentally running into them and stuff. Also, I don’t choose characters because of their “character”, I choose them based on their stats and how they can race. I really don’t care if other people perceive this person as being a backstabbing jerk – I just want to go down the mountain in the coolest way possible, and I would rather not be tripped by that silly little chit for nothing I did.

Some of the same faces are back, but with new opponents to challenge them. They did a better job of building up the characters and NPC’s more evenly, so you aren’t running races against five of that Japanese guy in a yellow helmet like happened so frequently in the last game. There is a much wider field of characters to choose from this time as well.

EA spent a fairly offensive amount of money on the voice acting for the characters. Good new is, it doesn’t show all that much. The star voices don’t stick out more than they should. There is a sort of “making-of” video that is sort of fun to watch just for information. I found it fun to match the faces of the actors with the voices in the game – some of the contrasts are rather interesting. Everyone made a huge deal of Elise’s voice being done by Lucy Liu. She doesn’t sound that different from the no-name actor who did her for the original game, and hearing her voice come out of the very Caucasian character was a bit odd at times.

To the younger set, it is all about getting better boards and outfits. As you progess through the levels, you accomplish sets of tricks to fill out your Trick Book. Once you have filled up a trick book, you get a new outfit. You win new boards by winning medals at each venue. If you fill up your entire Trick Book, you earn what they call the Master outfit and your Uber board. This shows up as a sort of liquid chrome effect around your character and the board in the setup screen that looks cool, but I had assumed was just some sort of camouflage so it was a surprise when you earned it. I was wrong; you actually look like that. It makes for an interesting play dynamic, because you reflect the surfaces around you, and in several of the venues this means your character can literally disappear, which makes finding the ground kind of challenging.

It doesn’t require a huge investment to just play and have fun, but if you want to spend the time and get into it, the game has plenty of depth to keep you going. To quote my character, “I love this game!”

MomGamer’s Note (ESRB Rating: E for Everyone) The ESRB has tagged this one with “Comic Mischief, Mild Language, Mild Violence”. I am not sure what they meant by comic mischief, but there is some cases where you smack other players and they smack you back – no blood and nothing but a fall in the snow and a possibly dismayed comment. There are also videos in between the levels where the Rivalry system is displayed, usually as someone making rude comments to your character about their skills. These can be skipped, though. There are cases where characters are less than fully dressed, but other than shape nothing unseemly is shown (bare arms and tight clothes for some of the ladies, and a couple of guys with shirtless outfits). Everyone has a choice of outfits, and except for “tightness”, you don’t have to let them wear anything too daring if you don’t want to.

One thing you might want to consider with younger kids is imitation. Some of the tricks in the game will flat get you killed – this is NOT real life, and you do insane things like jump off 150 foot cliffs and land on your feet. This one needs a big “Do Not Try This at Home” stenciled across the screen. If your children are prone to going out back and trying out what they just saw on TV, this might be something to watch for.

All in all, considering the dark, violent tone to a lot of the games out there, I find this one a breath of fresh air. I personally give this one two thumbs way up as a Mom, but as always, I would suggest you play it, and you make the call.