You know, I wish one day children wouldn't be children.
Anybody under the age of twelve I can understand. They have yet to learn how the world really works, and as ignorant as they frankly are they cannot be blamed for this any more than I can be blamed for being ill, or you can be blamed for needing to eat. It's those above that begin to annoy me. If you're thirteen or older, the school system should have slapped some sense into you, if your parents already haven't. You snap out of the entitlement you feel towards everything unimportant - music, presents, cake...
So why, oh dear god why, do we have people aged between fifteen and thirty raging about the new SSX teaser?
We kind of knew there would be an SSX announcement this VGAs. The awards show, despite (realistically) being a complete farce, is still a hotbed for announcements of new titles and said titles are leaked almost as much as the E3 splurge. With EA trademarking a bunch of the domains for a new SSX, enough rumours to stuff no less than eighteen Sackboys and the mountain shot teaser, we knew it'd come.
What we didn't expect was the apparent style change. No more Mac and Kaori. What we get was dark, dangerous and exciting. A thirty second cinematic with zero gameplay, but plenty of premise, and a single selling blurb that hints towards a bit of danger. We cannot even hazard a guess of how the game will actually play.
But the rage. Oh dear god the rage. People old enough to have been twenty when the first game was released right through to people who never played the first SSX on account of just starting grade school are complaining about the style change - a change we haven't actually seen a lot of. That I can somehow understand, though, because after all the trailer was such a polar opposite to what the SSX series is known for and there is a bit of shock value to that.
What I don't understand, or at the very least don't like in the slightest, is how people are so quick to judge the gameplay. You know, the gameplay of a game we've seen absolutely nothing of. It has got so bad, people are even inventing mechanics to make it sound worse than we know it is. Why? All for the sake of slamming EA for rebooting a series that, as far as they are concerned, did not need a reboot.
Frankly this stinks of rose-tinted smelling salts and plenty of pot. What many of these people are not mentioning is that there hasn't actually been a really good game in the series since SSX3, which in itself was more of an advancement of SSX Tricky (but a very worthy advancement and possibly the best in the series as a whole). SSX On Tour was almost universally slammed by the fanbase, and most people have never head of Blur, or have simply forgotten about the existence of that Wii outing.
If EA was going to make a profit off this game, or at least reach some acclaim, they were going to have to change it a bit. Could the game be named anything other than SSX? Probably, but even so it would still be a successor at least spiritually. Without the SSX logo, the fanbase would be clambering even more for a new SSX game. With it, they are angry at the change in style.
They simply cant win.
My point is, don't get angry over the new game before we've seen so much as a screen shot of the actual gameplay. Sure, you're annoyed at the style change, but for all you know it could still be the great adrenalin-producing, laws-of-physics-breaking break-neck game you know and truely love, even with the possible added tastes of Realism in the style.
Look at it this way: The closest thing we've had to a HD-console SSX was Stoked and it's sequel on the 360. If you have never heard of those: You have a few mountains that are about 90% mapped in their entirely, and it's free roam. The idea was to be dropped on a mountain and have fun, but sloppy controls, iffy physics and no real enjoying goals eclipsed the technical achievement of having full weather patterns and awesome views.
In other words, the closest we've had to SSX this gen was fundamentally broken. Be thankful for what we have coming.
