EA Shows How Much They Hate Their Customers With This Travesty of a Game.

User Rating: 1 | SSX PS3
You know what I miss? Playing a game from Electronic Arts that wasn't trying to screw me at every turn. I miss knowing that a game was made for the purpose of fun, rather than the purpose of making money and keeping gamers from playing with their friends. Such is the major downfall of SSX, the latest travesty in a long line of disappointing releases from EA.

Now, it should be mentioned that SSX can be very fun, when it works. The graphics are stunning, the gameplay is fairly tight (although I preferred the old school controls), some of the events are so over the top they take your breath away. But the truth is, the game rarely works. The first time I played it the game took 15 minutes to load. Today when I put the disc in to continue my review, the game attempted to connect to RIDERNET (the online competition board that was mandatory in order to play the game) for TWENTY MINUTES. By the time the game started up, I was so angry I turned it right off again.

Another problem is there is no local multiplayer, if I want to have some friends come over and race on my TV via split-screen, that doesn't exist. This is another growing trend of EA's that I'm getting quite sick of. Back in the days of PS2 (when the internet wasn't the newest way to rip gamers off) companies HAD to make sure their racing game had a mode where more than one player could play. This is part of what made SSX so much fun. Sitting on the couch with your buddies, talking trash. Now, in order to play this game with friends, I need to have a friend who owns the game and also has an inter0net connection to play with them…so really it's not the same at all.
And that's not the only infuriating element. EA has included the RIDERNET ONLINE PASS with the game, or as I call it "Pre-owned Proofing". I enter a code that allows me to play the game, but if I were to decide I didn't like this game, I sell it to EB Games and someone else buys it. But now, they have to pay an extra TEN DOLLARS in order to get a code so they can play it. There is a simple term for what this is… Robbery. And I, as a gamer and consumer, am done with this.

Electronic Arts used to be an amazing company that supported gamers and treated them like real people. Now they see us as wallets. They see us as wallets they can give a stripped down game to, charge us for all the cool content of the game that should have come free with it, charge us to play it with our friends, and above everything else make it impossible to even access the game if my internet connection is on the fritz.

SSX could have been amazing. It could have been a trip down memory lane for PS2 fanboys like me. Sadly, it isn't. It's terrible. It's astoundingly aggravating. And it's a shame that my score has nothing to do with the actual game itself, but the company that slaughtered it.