LET”S PLAY SSX 3! I am snowboarding the entire SSX 3 mountain with all 3 peaks in REAL-TIME and no cuts or loading screens with Viggo maxed out. This is my first Let’s Play of one of my favorite games of all time. Check it out!

SSX Elise Riggs drawing by H8orSaints. See his other artwork at :
http://h8orsaints.deviantart.com

Video Transcription:

Metal Jesus here, and today we’re gonna do something a little bit different, we’re gonna do a Let’s Play of one of my favorite games of all time, that is SSX 3 for the original Xbox. Now I think a lot of people are surprised that this is one of my all time favorite games, and in this video you’re gonna find out why because I’m gonna tell you all about it. We’re gonna play the game, but this game is kinda different in that it has a mode where literally you start at the top of the mountain, and you snowboard in real time through three different peaks. There’s no load screens, it’s pretty, pretty damn cool, we’re gonna do it right now, let’s take a look.

All right, so here we are, SSX 3, one of the most awesome games ever made, and I just want you to know I’ve turned off the music because, you know, YouTube and copyright and all that sort of stuff, but this game does have a pretty awesome soundtrack, it’s got some really cool electronic stuff, some remix stuff. Typically when I play this game, I do have the soundtrack cranking.

So what we’re gonna do is we’re going to conquer the mountain, and again I mentioned that one of my favorite parts about this is that it’s one continuous mountain, with three different peaks, and each one of those peaks is very different. You actually start trying to conquer the lower peak first and then you’ll graduate up to the second peak and then the third peak is the toughest. In my game here I’ve unlocked everything for a couple of characters, so we’re gonna go here. Here’s the character select screen, and this series typically has had some really great characters.

When I originally played this game, I played it on the PlayStation 2, and I had played it a ton, as I’m sure I’ll tell you about. But in that game, Drunken Master Paul and I unlocked pretty much most of the characters to their max. You notice that they go to 11 here, it goes to 11, and in this game on the Xbox here I’ve restarted it. I have Viggo maxed out, I also have Psymon maxed out, but he doesn’t have the entire mountain unlocked, but man does he look metal or what with that skull? Some of my favorite characters are Zoe. Zoe’s like this punk-rock chick, I love her shredded Def Leppard jeans and stuff. I haven’t unlocked everything for her, and then like I said Viggo we’re gonna play. Elise is a pretty cool character, she’s pretty hot. I also really like Allegra and then also Kaori, but for this game again we’re gonna play as Viggo. And you notice here that he is, I don’t know why I did this, but he has like this light blue wedding tux, with devil horns, shades, and then he’s got these flaming hands. It just seemed kinda weird, so, we’re gonna go with him, we’re gonna jump into it here.

So, right off the bat it throws you into the game, but we’re gonna jump into the transport, and we’re gonna go all the way up to peak three. Notice here that this is kinda what I’m talking about, we have the mountain, and you have these peaks that are tied together, so we’re gonna jump up to peak three, which is the toughest one. And we’re gonna ride all the way from The Throne, so notice how I can select here, The Throne is the very top, and we’re gonna ride it all the way down, in real time to the bottom. It takes about a half an hour and it’s a total blast, so let’s do The Throne. This is one of the animations that, the load screens essentially, where you hop into a helicopter, it takes you all the way up to the top. The cool thing about The Throne and the top of the mountain is that it’s pretty harsh up here, so you’re so high up, there’s a lot of frozen snow, a lot of wind, not very many trees, and you’ll see that the terrain will change dynamically as we play this game, so we’re gonna hop out here in a second.

And we’re off, cool. Now, right off the bat, I’m gonna say I’m not the best player at this game, there are lots of people who are probably way better than me. I’m pretty decent at this game, but I think there’s an awful lot to explore in this game and it’s tough to be like a master, but I did play it for almost an entire year. This came out actually at a time when I had lost my job, and it was the very first time that I had ever been unemployed, and I was pretty bummed, I was kind of like scared, I was like I didn’t know what’s gonna happen in my life. I was you know, collecting unemployment, oops. Oh, I made that. Anyways, and SSX 3 came out. Ugh, so close. SSX 3 came out, and it was kind of the perfect game. I had played the first couple of games and really enjoyed them, and then this game came out, and it’s just this open world game, there’s tons of stuff to explore and I was really able to just, again play it for like almost an entire year, it was like the perfect game for me.

Here is where you get to see sort of the kinda open worldness. Back there I could’ve gone left, or you can go right, and you get kind of a different experience depending on how you go. I watched some gameplay footage of other players playing this game, and you constantly learn new stuff. Again kind of like an open world game, you can kind of go wherever you want, but the level design here though is masterful. Because, there’s so many lines that you can take that just make sense and are fun to explore, and there’s not too many dead ends or areas where it’ll screw you over if you venture off the beaten path. This is one of my favorite sections of this particular part of the level, and that is where there are all these kind of, I don’t know what you call these, like snow veins or something like that, but basically places where you can kind of, oops, go back and forth, build up your uber.

Another thing you’ll notice here that I believe was new to the third game was the ability to recover, and that’s very, very nice, I don’t know if they got that from Tony Hawk or what but it used to be where if you crash, you kind of have to wait, it’d be kinda frustrating. In this game if you hammer the square button quickly enough, you can recover, which is pretty nice. Also you’ll notice there that I got a little bit of money, and sprinkled throughout the game are a bunch of these little snowflakes that basically help you build up your purse to unlock things like new songs, new outfits, new boards and things like that.

All right so, that was the very first part of it, and now what we’re gonna do is choose how we want to continue the game. And you’ll see what I mean, see this board coming up here? That’s essentially the menu, so we want to look for the race, because the race allows you to do freeplay, but you could choose to do a pipe or go for big air and stuff like that, but that’s kinda how you can continually snowboard in this game. You can also go to the lodge here, and that’s where you would update your character. What else do you do at the lodge? Oh, you also move around and stuff like that. You use the lodge a lot whenever you’re playing just sort of the main, I was gonna say the main quest, but essentially when you’re trying to unlock stuff.

We don’t want to go to the super pipe we want to go to race. Every race in this game gives you the ability to do free run or free whatever it’s called. There’s a downed airplane there, and you notice it’s a lot of ice, oops, a lot of sliding around, there’s not a lot of deep snow here, so it’s very fast. So we’re gonna go here, so you’ll notice as we approach the race, we could race, but again I’m trying to do this all in real time so you’ll see it’ll give me the option. It’s a little bit confusing, to be honest, at the top of the mountain here, you’re not quite sure where you need to go, but see here, see freeride, big challenge, or I could go in there, and I could race some people. So we’re gonna go around here. Now, notice that, that’s a challenge that you could do, where it’d be like do specific amount of tricks, there’s a bunch of different sort of challenges in the game that are just sprinkled throughout levels, which is kind of fun.

Again, a ton of content in this. Also notice that out of bounds right there, oops, really went out of bounds. Typically those are shortcuts, and handy shortcuts, too. This level, as you’ll see, is pretty fast, it’s very steep, and it’s much, much easier whenever you’ve leveled up a character like I have because you can turn fairly sharply. Oh, there we go, nice little ride there. But again, there’s a bunch of different ways to do this particular level, lots of hidden stuff. I do like this level a lot because you just basically just need to hold on, hold on tight. That’s a nice little air right there, and woo-hoo! Here we go, notice that, oh, out of bounds, there we go, yay, little shortcut. Can I do that there? Hey, hey I actually did it. Yay, that’s a cool a ride, that’s a cool ride. Again, you don’t have to do that right there, you could literally just go on either side of it. Notice here that it says “super uber” and I believe that’s new, it’s been so long since I’ve played Tricky, the second one, but I believe super uber is new to this one where there’s literally two levels of tricks where they just get more and more outrageous as it goes along, which is one of my favorite parts of this game is that, this game doesn’t try to be a simulator. It’s not realistic in any way, it’s just fun. It’s very similar to Tony Hawk, really. I’m sure that probably the developers were going after that Tony Hawk vibe, you know? Which is what I like, I like arcade games.

And right now it starts counting down for me to do the next uber trick. So I’m spelling out super uber here. That right there is a little modifier that speeds up your trick and there I’ve spelled super uber. And that is the end of that area, and notice that the fence pushes me to the right to keep on going to the next area. But again, it can be kind of tricky to get through all this, tricky, it’s tricky. Because, oops, you’re not sure where to go sometimes. You just kinda have to trust the game to guide you down the mountain. Usually these sections are pretty straightforward, oops, but you do have to kind of pay attention. Like, I need to go to the race area otherwise I’ll be stuck doing a, you know, an event, which I don’t wanna do, not this time. Okay, all right, so we’re in the next section. Notice that it’s now this kind of like red, sort of, I don’t know if it’s kind of a morning glow or what, but it’s beautiful, beautiful lighting.

Speaking of which this game, when it was first announced, there was a bunch of people who worked in Hollywood movies who actually worked on this game to do some of the special effects, specifically when it comes to some of the snow. So, for instance, some of the glitter that’s happening, the sunlight glistening. I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what the technical term is, but basically the sunlight like on levels like this where you can kind of see it bouncing off around the snow, that really wasn’t done that much in these type of games. Some of the other lighting special effects just all involving snow were handled by people from Hollywood who kind of knew how to do that sort of stuff, and it shows. I think this game is a beautiful game, I love how it changes the look and feel.

This is a really awesome track here, so now we’re actually into the track, can I get up there? Yes, yay. That reminds me, one of the parts that they did really well in this game is the riding of rails, you do that an awful lot in this game, but more than that actually you can also do trickies off of rails as well, and it’s pretty satisfying. This is a big jump here, let’s go crazy, see what we can do. There we go, yeah, can’t do that in real life, you’d probably die, you’d probably like twist off your head or something, all right, here we go. One of the interesting things is that around this time, I was really getting into the PSP and they released a version of this game on the PSP. And for the most part actually it’s a pretty decent port. You know the PSP is pretty powerful, it can do these type of graphics in this kind of game really well. But the one place where they really screwed up the PSP version was the rails. And I don’t know what it was, but getting on rails in the PSP version is just a pain in the butt, you’ll get knocked and screwed up all the time on it, it’s just so frustrating. It’s kind of a bummer, because again when that came out, I was playing a lot of PSP and, you know, when one of your favorite franchises doesn’t do so well on the system, you’re kind of bummed. This is a fun level too, because I’m bypassing, oops, a bunch of other ways to do this level, and you’re gonna see more of those coming up here. Man, the trickies in this game are just crazy, out of bounds, oh, no.

Let’s take this way, remember those upside down 7-Up ads? It’s pretty funny, this game also had some other ad placements, like, there’s a Honda, I forget what it is, Honda had this kind of CRV-RAV thing, and this game, oops, well that was good, this game allowed you to, like, snowboard through one. There’s definitely some product placement in this, not a big deal. But yeah right there, what is that called? I have no idea what that thing is, but there’s one level in the game where literally you can snowboard through the open door of that thing. That was a little bit sloppy, but I ended up down here in this kind of tunnel, not the best place to be because the snow’s kind of deep, you don’t go too fast. Here’s…oh, oh, oh, don’t crash, oh. That happens because I’m a little bit too fast of a character. All right, and that is that area, and we’re gonna continue on. Now, one thing that we’re missing here, if you’re looking at this for the first time, and that is that for every one of the these that I’m just going on a race, I’m actually skipping past a lot of the different levels. So there’s dedicated pipe levels on each peak, there’s also different runs, like, completely different runs that you could hit up, that I am just skipping.

Transport lodge, okay, so we’re gonna go this way. Okay, we’re gonna go race. It can be kind of confusing, especially the first time you play this you’re like, “Where do I go?” But for the most part when you first start playing this game you just kinda do everything, you know? That’s the fun thing, you just explore. Again, because it’s an open world game and I spent an entire year exploring this game, and I feel like I still don’t know where everything is. Another thing to note is that I believe it’s only the PlayStation 2 version was the version that supported multiplayer, and I did a bit of that when this first came out, and it was really fun. I don’t think the Xbox did, although it should have, but I don’t know. Sadly no more, okay.

Okay, this is a really fun run here too, pretty steep, you need to be able to corner really well. There’s lots of rail riding on this level if you want. Oh, oh-ho. I’m digging his flaming hands, I don’t know why. It’s kind of dumb, but let’s ride this, there we go. This game blisters along too, it’s gotta be 60 frames a second. That’s a nice big jump there, there we go. I’m gonna take a little shortcut here, oh. All right. You know, it’s funny I don’t really need money in this game, oops, but it’s still fun to collect those snowflakes, you know, they’re always placed in really interesting, ah God, ah, suck. They’re always placed in really interesting, you know, challenging places. Am I gonna die here? Oh, there we go, that works. All right, that was sloppy, but I’ll take it. All right, heading into some fog, oops, oh, no, no, no, ah. I just want to push him. We’re gonna enter a part of the level which is kind of interesting, it’s almost like a Tibetan kind of Asian vibe here. You’re gonna see it in a second. Yeah, see right there. Oh, you know what? I just saw that I could’ve gone left, huh, learned something new. Here we go, oh, that was a close one, three different rails. Let’s take the left one, oh, or not. All right we’ll take this one, here, you look good.

You noticed I trickied on that, kind of fun. And you can chain those together if the rails line up, and you can do some crazy combos, again, I’ve seen people online do stuff like this that are just God-like. Oh, damn, not doing so hot. Here we go, you can go left or straight here, we’re gonna go straight. Here’s kind of fun where you just sort of go through the forest, oops, whoa, and trees start falling, because a storm’s coming in. Wow that was close, here we go. Oh-ho, yes, thank you, woah. There we go. Monster Trick, super uber. Oh, almost hit that tree, thank you, thank you.

All right and I think we’re approaching the end, yes. End of this part of it anyways. Okay, cool, all right so we can go left or right, let’s go left. I don’t think it really matters I think it takes you both places. Yeah, so we’re progressing along, this is SSX. So, you know, one of the reasons why SSX means so much to me is because it was one of the first games I ever played on the PlayStation 2. I was pretty much a PC gamer at this point, just coming off of Sierra and again I really hadn’t jumped into console gaming yet.

And my buddy, Beau, who I worked with at Sierra, he’s been on my channel, we did an IH episode once. He bought a PlayStation 2, and you know, for the most part when that first came out, the launch titles were okay, nothing really blew me away. However, he did pick up the original SSX, and that was a PlayStation exclusive, and initially we weren’t really that impressed with it. However, it was the kind of game that really exposed how much it had going on as you played it. And the reason why I that is because I remember Beau calling me up excited because he figured out how to chain some of the uber tricks and stuff like that, I don’t even know if they were called uber back then, but basically some of the tricks that you could do in that game. And there was just so much depth to it and I’d come over to his house, he lived in another city than me, he lived in Redman or Kirkland or something like that. This is a good area too, anyways, so I would go over there, he’d show me SSX, we’d play it, this is back when we were passing the controller back and forth, and I tell you what man, we learned to love SSX and just dig into it and explore it. It was the perfect mix of snowboarding and Tony Hawk, and all those sort of things, and we just loved it. And then the second game came out which was called Tricky, and they improved almost everything about Tricky. The characters got better, I love the characters in Tricky, they got a bunch of Hollywood voice actors to just come in and give their stamp on the stuff, and they did such an amazing job, they’re so funny, that’s the thing, Tricky is really funny.

And we just identified with the characters and just wanted to play them, we wanted to unlock, excuse me, all their stuff, but then also the level design and everything about that game. So, we played Tricky, oh my God, forever. And then this game came out and it’s funny because I don’t think Beau likes this game as much as I do. This is different, just different enough with its whole open world, but if you’re like me and you have the time to explore it, I think it’s actually the better game. The trick system’s perfect, just everything about it, and frankly this level here. I like doing trickies off of, oh, oh, oh, so close. This was kind of the era too when a lot of games were starting to do open world.

Grand Theft Auto 3 came out and I think a lot of people saw the potential of doing open worlds, loading all these crazy levels off of DVD for the first time, and you started seeing a lot of games do this. SSX 3 obviously did this but, you know, just some other games like, what was the one in LA? Oh, I actually pulled that off, wow. Just a bunch of games just became kind of open world, and not many of them, not all of them did it well, oh, I missed that. But this one did, this one did it really well. Notice the change in the level, so we went from really dark up at the top, and then in the previous level we were kind of like morning sort of, you know, that kind of red orange tint, now it’s a clear day, you can really see the mountains in the background. Oh, got lucky, all right. That’s the end of that section there.

I’m not sure what peak we’re on, we’re probably on peak two. I’ll be honest, actually it’s been a while since I played this game. Oh, this might be peak one, yes, okay, so here we are. So now we’re approaching the end. This is the last section of the game and it’s kind of weird it gets really dark, and there’s a city down there, and that’s where we’re gonna end up. But again, I wanna stress though that if you’re watching this for the first time I’m skipping past at least half of the game. See that super pipe right there? That’s it’s own section. Each one of those menus typically is like a little bit different area, a different layout, so there’s a lot to explore. And I don’t know what our time is on here but usually it takes me about a half an hour to get down this thing. All right, let’s go Viggo. I will say though, it’s fun to do this, but I do miss the other characters. In racing, when you race in this, you race the other characters that you can unlock and there’s a bit of a feel of Road Rash, the motorcycle game where you can kind of punch people.

There’s an element of Road Rash in this game when you do that kind of battling, which is kind of fun and you can create rivalries and all that stuff. This is a level that has a bunch of different ways to do it. I’m not really sure which way is the quickest, there’s a lot of stuff to find in this level, even on top of buildings, so you’ll see a jump that might look like it heads straight towards a building but in reality there may be something up there. Dude, again I’m not the best player, clearly. But oh, I could’ve got on that, I didn’t. Let’s ride this, there we go. That’s fun. There we go, there we go, there we go, oh, nice. Thank you, Viggo. This is a fun jump. Woo-hoo, that was fun. Now I could go around there or…I guess I’m gonna go around here. Notice there’s more cities, that’s been a common thing actually in this game. In the first one, it’s fun because you explore this almost like sunken, well it’s not sunken, this like snowed-in city and you’ll go through the middle of buildings and stuff, it’s pretty cool.

You know, I should say that I’ve mentioned that this is my favorite in the series, I should probably talk about the other ones too and that is SSX: On Tour, which is the one that came out after this one which they added skis and also it’s got this kind of hand-drawn art style. It’s okay, the level design is not as fun as this, I don’t know why. Again, I think it’s an okay game, I’ve played it a lot and then the series I think kind of died I don’t think there was one after that, oh, we’re almost at the end here. And then there was the reboot that happened a couple years ago on, like, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox, and that was a complete disappointment. Again, it didn’t have the characters, the level design was okay, so that’s it.

That is top to bottom, in real time, all three peaks of SSX 3. But anyways, getting back to the reboot, again it just didn’t have this over the top, fun, arcade feel to it. It was close, it just didn’t have the magic. What else can I talk about this? I guess again, getting in here you can kind of see what goes on in here, so for instance peak three has a bunch of different, yeah, so it has two races and then you can do the all peak race, freestyle, freeride, and you can jump to any of these at any time. There’s also money to be earned all that sort of stuff. So anyways, I’ve covered most of the, you know, but that is my Let’s Play of one of my favorite games of all time, I hope you guys enjoyed it. I’d love to know what you think down in the comments below. And if you liked this video and like to see more of them, I’ve got a lot of games I could play. All right, thanks for watching guys, and take care.

So, that is my very first Let’s Play video, please be gentle. I don’t know if it was that good or not, but I honestly had a ton of fun doing it. The time just flew by, but again I was playing one of my all time favorite games, but I could see me doing this with a lot of other games that I own and enjoy playing, or maybe even some that I just suck at, who knows? Could be kind of fun, let me know down in the comments below, thanks for watching.