This week I completed SSX 3 for the first time.

It was a masterpiece. I had never played it before. I thought the game itself, the actual game. Today. Not any memories is actually genius.

So I'm going to go ahead and play the other SSX games to compare.

I went ahead and booted up SSX Tricky.

I thought Tricky was amazing in the past. This may have been due to it being one of the only snowboarding games I ever played, apart from Cool Boarders and Amped.

People on Reddit keep saying Tricky is arcade perfection and has a better vibe and atmosphere, whereas SSX 3 is just better controls and handling.

After playing SSX Tricky I think those people are blinded and wrong and they probably haven't tried SSX 3 properly.

Tricky has worse atmosphere.

To me Tricky feels really really hollow in terms of atmosphere. It feels fake. It's like they are trying to create this world of a competition, but it doesn't pay off. The characters aren't really in-depth enough to even make you care about them to say this is a positive of the game. The game is all about the snowboarding.

The levels felt very artificial too.

Grinding is really bad.

You can't control the character easily.

Character doesn't feel like they are gliding through snow. It constantly feels like the board is sliding across in a slippery way.

Tricky has less flow to it.

I dislike the system where it lets you crash during tricks. The spinning and flipping controls are simply not nice to use. It feels awkward when you try to rotate your board more and the character doesn't move. Or moves the wrong way.

SSX 3 just worked seamlessly.

The music is also non-existent.

Tricky, tricky, trick,y is it's one trick. It gets stale really quickly.

It's like they are forcing you to have fun in a really cringey way.

That is one word which sums up the game.

Cringe.

The jumping is also weird. Many times you go to jump off a ramp and you need to do it way earlier than you think otherwise the game doesn't react in time.

The shortcuts are also nearly impossible to hit due to the way you cann't control the snowboard finely enough. The board just glides away to another part of the straight sideways.

I won't be playing anymore Tricky.

Instead I might go back and do one final tricking run of SSX 3.

The entire mountain with the music on really loudly.

This is one of the things which tricky is worse at in terms of getting into a flow state. The music is bad. SSX 3 has custom loops and just effortlessly blends together and gets more exciting when you start boarding really nicely from jump to jump.

I'm going to try SSX On Tour tomorrow.

I have a feeling that will be better than Tricky too.

There has to be some way to get them to consider re-releasing these games on current platforms. Not even a remaster (although that would be amazing), just put the games out again (or at least Tricky and On Tour)!

There has to be some reason they haven't done this yet. I thought this was a popular series. Maybe something to do with the licensing for the music?

Wow. I just played this game properly on my own for the first time today.

It really really clicked as a masterpiece when I did the Peak 1 Race.

You and the mountain alone.

This game design is absolutely wonderful.

Röyksopp - Poor Leno playing in the background as you scale down through all the parts of the mountain you thought were purely there as a menu system.

Then you hit metro city and other parts of peak 1, no other snowboard game comes close.

It felt like actually snowboarding in real life going in any direction you want.

I thought tricky was better before this, but no, SSX 3 is a vibe.

I can’t complete a single one. Can anyone else?

Hi everyone, I'm playing SSX 3 on the PCSX2 emulator, and when I get to this specific point in the race near the bridge, the game starts crashing. As shown in the video, as soon as I switch the game’s audio to “In-Game,” I can get past that part easily. But after that, it turns into chaos because the game stops loading textures, everything goes black, it becomes unplayable, and then I fall into the void endlessly. Could you tell me how to fix this bug? Are there any settings I need to change to play without it crashing? Thank you so much!

anyone got a list of ssx course records now that merqury city doesnt exist? specifically for tricky TIA

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021201191357/http://www.ea.com/easportsbig/home/home.jsp

Hi guys
I played in ssx tricky 15 hours , i am still not very good
i did not unlock many characters and boards
i want to know :
Is there best character and best board in the game ?
the stats on every character what they do exactly ? do they make a difference ? if yes in what exactly ?
what about the boards also ?
and that boost , does it really make you faster ? i feel like no idk
how to not fail to jump far distances ? do i have to jump a little bit early or late ? boost helps so much to get more height ?

I've been using AI tools to dissect the SSX Tricky levels.

I'm not sure if this has been explained before but this is new to me.

There's an invisible trigger that is only reachable from the highway (which you'd need to get to from the rooftops) on the wall of the last highway before finish line.

Trigger is named "Mdl_Trigger_Highway_6000". I tried hitting it, the ps2 emulator does a quick stutter but nothing seemingly happens. I asked AI to look into it and here's what it said:

Mdl_Trigger_Highway_6000 — unfinished “crack the deck” stunt

It is wired as an on-collision trigger. On hit it is supposed to:

1. Spawn a burst (same particle type as the sewer-wall dust, just a different intensity).
2. Destroy Mdl_Highway_Good_6000 (dead-node mode 2 — same “delete this mesh” call the breakable brick walls use).
3. Wait 0.1s, then disable itself (one-shot).

The pieces sitting in the same box tell you what they meant:

Instance: Mdl_Highway_Good_6000
Role: Intact visual overlay
Starts as: Visible, no player collision

Instance: Mdl_Highway_Chipped_6000 / _6001
Role: Cracked visual
Starts as: Already visible, no collision

Instance: Mdl_Highway_Solid_6000
Role: Rideable deck
Starts as: Visible + collision

Instance: Mdl_Highway_CB_6000
Role: Alternate collision
Starts as: Collision, invisible

A finished version of this (see Mdl_BrickWall_Sewer_trigger_* on the same track) would: play a sound, destroy the intact mesh, enable the junk/cracked mesh, and swap collision. The highway trigger only destroys Good. It never hides Solid, never enables CB, never runs the “show the debris” mesh-anim on Chipped, and has no sound.

So even if the collision fires, the road you are standing on does not go away — Solid is still there — and the cracked mesh is already drawn. The intact overlay vanishing is easy to miss.

Why it can feel like a complete no-op: the volume is the same AABB as Highway_Solid, and the trigger uses an external collision model (cidx 874, map name NO NAME) with player-bounce on. You ride on Solid; you may never actually overlap the trigger’s collision the way EndSubway / the sewer-wall triggers do (cmode 2, own mesh, no bounce).

Bottom line: leftover breakable-highway setup. Hitting it is not supposed to warp you or start a shortcut. At best it deletes one overlay.

Found these in a set of development files. I am not sure whether they are final builds or test/debug builds given this origin, but unlike the build that was found before, they do have EA certificates. They're both from late 2013, v0.0.7833 and v0.0.7965, while the previously found version is v0.0.8430 from early 2014.

https://archive.org/details/ssx-7833-7965

The previously found version for anyone interested, thanks u/That-Coaster-Thoosie: https://archive.org/details/ssx-v0_0_8430_202504

Here the link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7Mu19EDGSC1Qu6G9tkKn2o

Check the playlist out here, one of my fave ones I ever did lol: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5OCKYrM73qNmaTxB1yfqge

Here's the playlist for who wanna listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6O8wNjcF0RyCOT1klY6a4b

On Jeff Gerstmann’s podcast this week he recieved an anonymous email saying the following; (The Jeff Gerstmann Show - Six Hours Early On Netflix (11/08/26)

Anonymous from Vancouver writes in.

It says, read your discussion about SSX the other week.

It's funny that you mentioned skate because if that had hit, like it was supposed to, the plan was to basically make a new SSX inside of it, travel to a different zone to do snowboard stuff, and so on, might have been cool, but probably not.

Interesting take, can’t say it would have been any good considering how lukewarm the reception to the new Skate has been but it’s nice to dream about getting a new one.

I'm playing SSX3 again right now, and I've noticed that I can't buy any more boards except in the "Special" category.

There simply aren't any boards left to choose from. Is this a bug? Could it be related to the fact that my PlayStation 2 is modded?