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SSX Blur & Tutorials

March 13, 2007 By Glenn Turner

It used to be that you could mostly get away with not bothering with a tutorial. A game's rules and controls could usually be sussed out pretty quickly via trial and error as all it really took was pressing every button on the controller and observing what happened.

The Wii changes that.

Thanks to the versatility of the Wiimote, unless the controls are flagrantly obvious or patterned on real-life motions, you simply can't just dive into a game without have the controls drawn out for you – literally and figuratively. And most of the Wii games I've played have had pretty comprehensive, patient and enjoyable tutorials, especially Elebits, although WarioWare: Smooth Moves is no slouch in that department either.

Then there's SSX Blur. The latest in EA's bigger-than-life snowboarding series, has a tutorial, however I'd balk at calling it useful. In fact, it's more confusing than anything else. Let's start with the tutorial menu:

The SSX Blur tutorial menu is arranged like a pie cut into reasonably-sized pieces, which makes it nice and easy to select an option via the Wiimote – no struggling to point at a tiny bar here. The only problem with this is that there's no visible hierarchy. Given that tutorials innately build on previous lessons, this is a bit of a problem, and left me wondering 'exactly where do I begin?' Sadly, the answer wasn't at the option in the 12 o'clock position like I thought it might be. They could have at least numbered them in the menu!

ssx_blur_carving.jpg

What compounds this problem is that there's no real sense of progression as you play through the tutorials. None of the tutorial steps are checked off as you complete them and, apart from the numbers displayed only when you start one up, there's little to tell you what place the lesson you're currently playing has in relation to the others. I even ended up accidentally replaying through all of the steps before I noticed that they had looped over and started the first one again.

The other, much more substantial, problem is simply that the tutorial levels don't give a novice user enough time to acclimate to the controls. For instance, while going through the 'uber trick' tutorial, you're told to execute two 'uber tricks', which are easiest to execute by using a ramp. You get two explicit ramps in the tutorial section so ... miss a ramp or flub an uber trick and you've basically failed the tutorial. On the positive side, the strip of mountain allotted for the tutorial section is so short that you don't have to wait that long to restart. Unfortunately the amount of time you sit waiting for the tutorial to reload feels almost as long as the time you spent failing it in the first place, and leaves you plenty of time to simmer in your frustration.

ssx_blur_uber_trick.jpg

There are a litany of other smaller, but still noteworthy, problems that hint that the tutorials were rushed out. For instance, if you're going through the 'spins/flips' tutorial and you manage to only execute one spin you receive the notice 'You executed 1 spins and flips.' Obviously, that should read 'You executed 1 spin and flip,' since there's no need for plurality. Or ideally, 'You executed one spin and no flips,' as the goal of the tutorial is to execute two spins and two flips each. A more explicit tallying, one that would actually list the number of accomplished spins and flips, would be much more helpful. That aside, the plurality problem sadly plagues most of the tutorials, not just the 'spins/flips' one.

It may sound like I'm being slightly pedantic, and perhaps I am, but it's virtually impossible to learn how to play SSX Blur without going through the tutorial (or perhaps the manual, although as someone who received the game via Gamefly, that wasn't available to me). When your tutorial is riddled with problems and frustrations, what message do you think that sends to the player?

I eventually shelved the tutorial outright (I only fully completed two or three of nine tutorials before initially giving it up) and, armed with a cursory knowledge of how to pull off the many snowboarding moves (luckily the tutorials are pretty straight-forward when it comes to illustrating the controls) I plowed right into the rest of the game. And while I don't feel the tutorials readily primed me to the best of their ability, I'm still able to enjoy the game. It's definitely not my favorite SSX experience quite yet – The free ride areas feel far too short and are interrupted all too often, the music lacks intensity and is too abrupt with its mood shifts, it doesn't have the same sense of speed and scale as the previous games, the character banter is eerily absent and the DJ chatter feels more forced – but for now, it still packs a an entertaining wallop. It's just a shame that the learning curve is so steep, no thanks to the tutorial session.

ssx_blur_grab.jpg

Obviously this tutorial has me reflecting on others that I've played, many of which simply aren't remarkable at all (including Deus Ex, which I was also toying around with this past weekend). Have any tutorials caught your eye, either in a conceptually positive and informative way, or in an insufficient & misleading way, like ol' SSX Blur here?

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5 comments for ‘SSX Blur & Tutorials’

#1 WholeFnShow Mar 13, 2007 11:09pm

Driver on the psx had the most mind-numbing and difficult tutorial I've ever experienced. By far and away. Since it was a game based around driving, they wanted to make sure you were, not good, Amazing at the driving mechanics before you left that basement garage.

It's not just that the tricks they had you pulling (powersliding, quick u-turns, slalom around the pillars, etc) were terribly difficult by themselves. It's that they made you exude perfection in order to get the required number done in the alotted few seconds. My friend and I spent hours just trying to leave the garage and start the game way back when. Absolutely horrifying way to start a game.

#2 w3a2 Mar 14, 2007 12:55am

ech, i hate tutorials. one i hated of late was the Zelda one - no real reason comes to mind, maybe than i found it annoying to have to hit a straw-filled dummy because some kids wanted me to?

i would rather go back to the old days when you'd play a game (very badly) for half a day, then resort to reading the manual - or even older days when you would read the manual on the way back from the shops and then shelf it, winging the rest of the way through.

this probably explains why i was never very good at video games

#3 R. LeFeuvre Mar 15, 2007 05:33am

I think it was one of the Half-Life spin-offs that had some sort of obstacle course which was pretty lame. I remember just wanting to start the damn game. (It certainly wasn't Half-Life itself, the beginning of that game is "Hey, PhD dude, go push that cart into that crazy energy beam, I bet Barney $20 it blows up!")

Crackdown has some really REALLY annoying help messages which seem to restart every time I start the game up on a fresh boot. It's pretty annoying to still hear the guy say stuff like "Check out the tutorial videos to see what a REAL agent can do." I'm freakin' maxed out you prick, I am a real agent. Worse yet is when it just triggers the wrong statement, like hearing the help dude compliment the amazing view you have when all you are looking at is the ground.

MGS 1 had a great system, at least in the re-release, with the VR missions. There was always the codec beeping in your ear to give contextual advice, but the VR missions just worked so great because it actually made the tutorial canon to the story.

The MGS 2 came out and they replaced the fucking thing with some of the most annoying help coded messages ever! One part stupid main character ("Head to the Node" "The NERD!?"), one part annoying girlfriend, and no parts VR. Boo.

And in a similar vein to that of MGS 1, Psychonauts had the ubertastic Basic Braining stage. I really appreciate it when designers work the tutorial into the plot instead of forcing you through a totallyt vanilla, multi-step, mind-numbing, crap-tastic borathon (apparently) like the journal-inducing SSX Blur. No thanks.

And hey - how about License Tests in Gran Turismo! Difficult AND required!! Fucking International A License!

#4 w3a2 Mar 15, 2007 05:57am

R. LeFeuvre wrote:

And hey - how about License Tests in Gran Turismo! Difficult AND required!! Fucking International A License!

hells yeah. i think i gave up after spending 3 months on Class B licence.

also the splinter cell tutorial was ok (it was instructional) - but rather frustrating

#5 Kamikaze Mar 15, 2007 07:27am

R. LeFeuvre wrote:
I think it was one of the Half-Life spin-offs that had some sort of obstacle course which was pretty lame. I remember just wanting to start the damn game.

Mm, Opposing Force. I remember being frustrated with it as well. I suppose it was pretty necessary though, mainly to teach you how to use the unbelievably stupidly designed and frankly, broken, rope swinging. Still, considering it was an expansion, you'd think people would probably have played the core game enough to get everything else.