April 14, 2011 Comments (0) Views: 5287 Nerds, Videogames

Nerdgasm: SSX: Deadly Descents

That’s right, we’re going to stop for a minute and nerdgasm about…gasp, a sports game! If you didn’t play SSX, frankly, you fucked up. Plain and simple.
Much like how Tony Hawk’s Pro Skateboarding made those confounded board-skates cool for the average geek, SSX made flying down a mountain at 100 mph with a hip hop soundtrack blaring behind you into something that every self-respecting nerd should cherish and say “Yeah, I snowboard…in my living room.” The series tries as hard as it can to distill fun down to basic, easy to grasp elements injected with 10,000 milligrams of adrenaline, and it has been far too long since we got to guide Mac, Kaori, Elise, and the rest of the cast down the biggest peaks on the planet.
Enter SSX: Deadly Descents, or as many referred to it back in December when it was revealed during the Spike VGAs, SSX: Black Ops. Can you tell why?

Yeah, no. Why is snowboarding suddenly so intense and dramatic? Where are the candy colors and bright sunny skies to greet us as we carve the snow into intricate patterns of speed boosts, gravity defying tricks, and faceplants? EA, how could you tease us like this, promising a return to power for a long dormant series only to somehow rehash the same dude-bro, Call of Duty mentality present in roughly every game produced in the West these days…in a sports game?

But all is not lost! Enter the development video logs with a ray of hope that EA has not forgotten exactly what made the SSX series so beloved – pure, unadulterated fun at high speeds. Sure, the footage is at an alpha stage, with environments as vague shapes and textures a distant dream, but just look at those course designs. The character animations show fluid tricks calling back to happier times on the mountain. There is an energy and speed already present at this early point, so maybe things will go differently than we imagined just four months ago.
I admit, I’m an optimist on this. That’s why this is a nerdgasm instead of a nerd rage-gasm question thing. So what do you think? Will we be heralded into a new golden age of extreme sports racing, or is this just grasping at straws for a dead series? Talk about it on the forums?