SSX 3 Is One of the Greatest Games of All Time

Play Log #3: SSX 3
Game completed on: 12/30/24

One major goal for revisiting some of my favorite games from my youth is try to sort out whether they’re actually as good as I remember, or whether they’ve mainly stuck in my mind because I first played them in that golden age range of 12-20. It’s interesting to see how the classics stack up today.

(But let’s not get too high and mighty about it – the main goal is to just have a good time going back through some fantastic classic games). 

So, with that in mind, I’m happy to confirm…

SSX 3 is one of the greatest games of all time.

This might sound like a “no shit” statement. I’m not exactly going out on a limb here. Everybody loved SSX 3. But it had been a lot of years since I’d played it. Would DJ Atomika feel cool, or cringe? Would I miss modern polish? Would its stat progression feel good or feel padded? 

SSX 3 came out when I was 18 and I was completely enamored with it at the time. I whiled away countless hours exploring the back-country hunting for collectibles, maxing out characters, and completing BIG challenges. It was an absolutely formative game experience for me. If anyone is reading this that hasn’t played SSX 3 and doesn’t get it – surely it’s just another extreme sports game right? – you have to understand that SSX 3 genuinely was something special.

And now, over 20 years later and with me another 20 years older, it feels like SSX 3 hasn’t aged a day. Alas, I can’t say the same for myself.

To start, by playing SSX Tricky and SSX 3 back-to-back, a huge number of small improvements to gamefeel become immediately apparent. SSX 3 is just overall more generous and friendlier to the player. It’s easier to hop onto rails, a bit more generous with the angle needed to land tricks, and it feels like the game absolutely launches you out of a cannon when you go off a jump or off a huge rail. In SSX Tricky I frequently felt like I had just slightly too little airtime to do what I wanted. By comparison, in 3 I usually felt like I had just enough.

There’s more obvious moment-to-moment gameplay improvements and expansions too. A new class of “super uber” tricks and uber-grinds help round out your kit and help ensure you have something engaging and jaw-dropping to pull off at every moment. SSX 3 nails that feeling of a great iterative sequel by “touching up” dozens of small things. But thankfully it doesn’t stop there.

I’m DJ Atomika and This…. Is EA Radio Big

SSX 3’s premise – the entire game takes place on a single interconnected mountain which has been taken over by an over-the-top downhill snowboard festival – absolutely goes over with the player. And a huge part of the reason why is the in-universe “EA Radio BIG” host DJ Atomika and his seemingly endless voiceover. He gives weather updates, introduces every new event as you snowboard up to it, cracks jokes, and supplies a surprisingly large amount of mountain backstory and lore.

He never gets old, and his writing has to be genuinely commended for feeling effortlessly cool throughout. It’s a tough line to walk and it’s easy for games of this era to not have their in-game commentary age nearly as well (looking at you, DJ Striker in Burnout 3). 

Replaying the game now, I was surprised to see how little of that “mountain festival” vibe you ever actually see on-screen. It’s one of my most fond memories from SSX 3 and in fact there is virtually none of it in-game; it all comes from the in-game radio. That’s how evocative and effective it is. It gives you anecdotes about what’s happening around the mountain. It’s reactive to your progress. It checks in on your rivals.

This is an instance when less detail is better than more. You never see your helicopter pilot Powder Pete. He doesn’t talk. You just hear about his legendary exploits from the radio, and your mind fills in the rest. He doesn’t exist, and yet he feels like a part of this world. If SSX 3 were remade today I am skeptical they could resist turning him into a zany comic relief sidekick voiced by Seth Green.

DJ Atomika telling you what is happening on this mountain but the game never actually showing you what is happening is equivalent to old CRT TVs fuzzing out pixel art, thereby managing to give you more visual information than what’s truly there in the pixels. We have these mountain events described to us between races, and our mind fills in the details.

Snowboard Anywhere

SSX 3’s open-world structure is the game’s defining feature and the reason I’ve come back to it with so much fondness over the years. The entire game takes place on one huge mountain, and every race, trick event, and side challenge actually has a defined place within this mountain. You can freely ride up to any event and participate.

The “open world” is a little bit of a cheat – areas are loaded in and de-loaded when you snowboard through twisty cave sections now and again. It feels somewhat like the precursor to the “squeeze through narrow gaps” in every action/adventure game these days. But this never breaks the vibe in practice and doesn’t ruin the illusion.

There’s been some pushback against this open structure in recent years. Criticism that it just pads out the runtime between events – that there’s no reason or purpose to snowboarding up to an event vs. warping directly to it. I couldn’t disagree more. For one thing, if you wanted to play the game like SSX Tricky and just Menu your way from event to event, you can play the whole game that way. You don’t have to participate in the open map. So the design here is arguably the best of both worlds. You get the immersion and benefit from open exploration, but you only have to engage with it to the degree you want to.

But if you do engage with the open world, there’s so much to enjoy and appreciate. It’s very clever that depending on where you approach a course from, you can either trigger the actual event (race, high score trick run, etc) or you can simply ride past that starting mark and freely explore the course and space with no goals. Besides just feeling relaxing and freeing, having the ability to just ride around without purpose also lets you stumble on the minigame-style BIG challenges that litter the game world. 

These minigames are occasionally an SSX 3 low point – asking you to complete overly silly and complicated tasks via snowboard. But this only really matters if you’re trying to 100% the game. When they’re at their best, they do a lot to aid in SSX 3’s feeling of expansiveness. I’m especially fond of the ones that force you to flip the script and race down a trick course as fast as you can (it can be harder than it seems to not get huge air), or the ones that require you to set a trick high score on race courses. And there’s the thrill and reward that these have to be discovered from out in the world to begin with.

As mentioned before, the game’s open structure also allows DJ Atomika to comment on current events. It’s a tiny detail, but it adds a huge amount of verisimilitude to the world when the radio comments on what event is “coming up next” and who will be competing in it just as you’re making your way over.

I’m also incredibly fond of SSX 3’s three unstructured and more open “backcountry” areas. These three open zones are full of collectibles and BIG Challenges to uncover. They’re filled with untouched snow rather than snowboard tracks, downed trees to grind off of rather than rails, and natural hills to give you huge air rather than deliberately-marked jumps.  In practice, from an actual game design standpoint, these are basically just three more courses for you to explore. But they don’t feel that way at all. They feel like the wilderness. The lack of a collectible finder/waypoint is a bummer when you’re down to the final few and have no idea where they are, but that’s just how it goes with ~20 year old games. Overall, the pristine vibe of these areas is just unbeatable.

Finally no discussion of SSX 3’s open structure is complete without heaping praise on its epic final challenge: a 30-minute race through essentially the entire game, starting from its highest deadly peak and concluding at the base of the mountain, right back where you started. It isn’t actually particularly hard – in fact the time limit is such that it would be a little tough to not win. But I think that’s part of the point. It’s a victory lap. You’ve already won. You did it. Take in the sights. Veer off course to grab a collectible in the second backcountry zone you hadn’t seen before. Soak in the pop-punk soundtrack one last time. It makes you nostalgic for something that just happened. Remember that race course back from peak 1 you just played a few days ago? It’s back and you’re 6 minutes ahead of the race timer. Take your time. And of course this game-spanning time trial also shows off this seamless world they built.

It allows you – forces you – to just go. The whole game is like that. 

Too Cool for School?

As I mentioned in my SSX Tricky recap, there’s more online debate and discussion regarding SSX Tricky’s courses vs. 3’s than I was aware of, going into these replays. It’s true that 3’s courses are slightly more grounded, and have less variety overall, owing to them all being placed on a single mountain as compared to Tricky’s world tour theme. When you’re trying to ground your game with a better sense of place, like SSX 3, it’s hard to compete with a course like Aloha Ice Jam in Tricky, which has you “snowboarding” down a roaring waterfall.

But I vastly prefer SSX 3’s courses overall, and it still surprises me that that’s a slightly unpopular opinion. I’ve now played SSX 3 a lot over the past few weeks and I’m still finding new rails, racing lines, and areas I didn’t know existed. Every course in SSX 3 just feels like a positive iteration and expansion on what came before it. They’re all just huge, with massive opportunities for player self-expression and experimentation.

It’s true they’re a little bit less “memorable.” Even now, the specifics of one course vs. another are starting to fade from my mind. But that’s not because they’re worse – it’s because they don’t resort to a theme park-style gimmick to make them stick out.

SSS 3’s characters are a little less zany and somewhat more grounded than Tricky’s, too. This didn’t impact me, personally. Some complain about their favorite character missing from the sequel, but I didn’t even notice. These characters have one signature trick and maybe ~15 voice lines. Does it really matter that much? Although I don’t agree, I do at least understand the perspective of detractors that dislike SSX 3’s characters. DJ Atomika feels effortlessly cool and confident, but the character designs in SSX 3 are right up against the line of feeling deliberately mellowed out a little, and turned into more cookie-cutter “snowboard dudes and dudettes” – a criticism that could never be leveled at Tricky’s ridiculous line-up.

It just lets you feel like a snowboarder 

SSX 3 is ultimately just unbelievably immersive. It lets you live out this fantasy of participating in a snowboard festival taking over a willing mountain town. In-game text messages, banter, and the radio all reinforce it. It’s all oddly very…. cozy? It might be because I replayed the game over the holidays, combined with the heaviest possible dose of pure nostalgia mainlined directly into my veins. But I think the feeling is real. 

And, importantly, it manages to match these immaculate vibes with an evolved and perfected version of the world’s greatest over-the-top snowboard gameplay engine.

Dozens of tiny, thoughtful gameplay tweaks and refinements. A game that responds and reacts to what you get up to within it. Supremely rewarding exploration. An expansive and complete gameplay package that delivers on a singular vision with confidence.

SSX 3 feels like a product of an age of gaming that is unfortunately over. Can you imagine the paid up-sells if this game were to come out today? Regardless of whether that’s true or not – and I better stop now lest I start to unpack that thought – SSX 3’s overall confidence and quality undeniably places it among the absolute best-of-the-best that video games have to offer.