SSX On Tour

SSX On Tour is an arcade snowboarding and skiing race from EA Sports BIG that opened the series to skiing alongside snowboarding for the first time and set it in the fictional mountain resort of Peak, thematically different from earlier entries set in real mountain ranges. The game builds on flashy tricks, long combos of linked jumps, and the newly introduced special trick Monster Uber, and expands the career mode with a music-tour-style storyline in which the rider assembles their own crew, plays concerts between races, and competes for the favor of the crowd and the media. The soundtrack and overall presentation draw on the music scene of the time and give the game a deliberately over-the-top, showy tone typical of the whole SSX series, including witty commentary from announcers between races and stylized animations between the tour's stages that connect the individual locations into one cohesive story about the rider's rise.

The Xbox version was released simultaneously with PlayStation 2 in early 2005 and offers identical tracks, riders, gear, and game modes, including split-screen multiplayer for two players on one screen. The differences were again mainly technical — the Xbox's more powerful hardware allowed for somewhat more stable framerates in large races with many riders on the course at once, and slightly cleaner snow and environment textures, but the content itself, the number of tracks, and the scope of the career mode did not differ between the versions, nor did the selection of characters, gear, and music tracks. Players thus enjoyed the same content on Xbox as on PS2, just with a somewhat smoother technical presentation and without the visible framerate drops that occasionally appeared on PS2 during more crowded races, without this being any content-related disadvantage for PlayStation 2 owners, who got the full version with no restrictions and the same number of unlockable characters and gear.

Why play it: Players got the same content on Xbox as on PS2 — the same tracks, riders, and modes — just with more stable framerates in large races, so the platform here was more a matter of convenience.