Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Tony Hawk series laid down the groundwork for what would become the extreme sports genre.
It established a recipe that created a fantastic cake of a series. Take one part extreme sport,
two parts famous athlete from that sport, mix in a great soundtrack, and a touch of
attitude for good measure and you have yourself a quality game. But what happens when that
recipe falls into the wrong hands? Case and point, Jonny Moseley Mad Trix.
To everyone who doesn�t know, which I imagine is a lot of you, Jonny Moseley is a professional
skier, and his game aims to bring the culture of mad air, mad attitude, and mad trix. It
says it right on the box art. Sounds pretty cool. The game starts off with an opening
cutscene that can�t be described by anything else than laughably ridiculous. Jonny and
friends are just bro-ing out when Jonny wonders, what if it snowed in San Francisco? What?
Yeah, that�s the kind of game this is, trying to bring realistic trix skiing, mixed with
absolute absurdity.
The game is broken down in several different game modes. You can go to ski school, because
everyone who loads a videogame wants to go to school. There you learn the basics of the
game. After you have those down, you can go to the more extreme modes. There is Big Mountain
mode. Here you travel all around the world and go to real locations like Nepal, Alaska,
Lake Tahoe, and the luxurious Antarctica. This mode has you trying for a high score
to complete the level. But there is also Slopestyle. Here the maps are a little bit more ridiculous.
These are the fantasy areas like a snow covered San Francisco, Rome, and Machu Picchu. You
have to compete against the scores of others in order to win medals. Finishing events unlocks
more gear and skiers to play with.
The skiing itself feels strange. It provides all you expect, with grinds, grabs, and spins.
But everything feels unresponsive. The tricks are done by combinations of the shoulder buttons
and square is used to tweak them. It is a struggle to get the skier to perform the trick
you want, and many times it doesn�t look that spectacular. Tell that to the announcer
who yells out the tricks over and over with the same super excitement.
Extreme skiing may be the greatest extreme sport out there, but this game does not convey
that. It feels like a lessen down version of a Tony Hawk game. Even if it snowed in
San Francisco, you probably wouldn�t want to stay inside playing this.