The graphics are beautiful, with a long draw distance, great texturing, and lots of special effects ranging from snow spray to fireworks. The sheer amount of distance you can put between yourself and the ground is staggering at times, and there's no slowdown here at all.

Tricky Gimmicks

The audio is great, and EA spared no expense and hired professionals for the voice acting. Lucy Lui for the cover girl Elise, David Arquette plays Eddie, Oliver Platt tackles Luthor, and the weirded out Macy Gray lends a lot of personality to the bald pimped out Seeiah. It's not just a gimmick though, as their catcalls and personality come to life and make the game all the more memorable. They give that rivalry system a real edge. The music is once again provided by Mixmaster Mike of the Beastie Boys and like the song says: "Nobody can do it, like Mixmaster Mike…" It consists of basic non-annoying techno mixes with Run-DMC used to great effect. One does wish the game supported MP3's like some other Xbox games do, however.Oh, the other big gimmick is the DVD content. You can watch several interviews with the voice talent, interviews with the developers, and other cool extras. Good stuff, not something you'd watch more than once but it's always cool to get a glimpse behind the scenes and its nice of EA to actually use the DVD space they've got here.

The bottom line is that SSX is special. And the reason for that is the incredible replayability and the pure game design it offers. It's constantly rewarding you with new tricks, new unlocked features, and new and different play modes designed to keep you playing. Playing to knock out a hated AI rival who's become your foe, to master that extremely difficult new trick, to play with a newly unlocked character, or, maybe only to better your own score. The game never becomes boring and you'll be playing a long, long, time before you exhaust all the possibilities, and then you can find someone else to play. Best of all the game can be enjoyed as a pure racer, you don't have to perform tricks, so it's still fun for the, um, less coordinated among us. This makes SSX Tricky a perfect addition to the Xbox library, something any game would want to own. Hey, "To rock around, it's right on time… (Here we go!)"