It’s a funny thing about avalanches. They seem trite when viewed in nature documentaries. They slide fast, purposeful, but on a 74-inch LCD screen they still look, well, miniature, almost cutesy, like icing sugar issuing down a tableaux vivant. But ask any snowboarder about an avalanche and they get a faraway look on their face and immediately go about scaring you.

“You don’t want that fucker on your back, man. Not when you’re jumping off cliffs or skiing down intense chutes,” said a snowboarder, some scrawny white guy with a sun-blasted nose who I’d met while on a story about Afriski in Lesotho. I pressed him on the topic, he gave a perfunctory nod and told me about his hero Craig Kelly, who was disposed of with seven skiers when an avalanche rolled down a mountainside in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia in 2003. He didn’t elaborate, he didn’t need to; no one lives through an avalanche, not that I’ve heard of. Skiers, snowboarders, trees, fauna, flora, they tend to get gobbled up by that white slide of mush and it’s adios muchachos.

And yet… to conquer an avalanche, to outrun it, escape, live to see another day, that would be brazen, like running up to God and pulling his pants down. That’s pretty much the gist of EA’s SSX – outliving avalanches and other deadly descents. Actually, that’s what the working title was in 2009, SSX: Deadly Descents. They ditched the subtitle but it’s still steep slopes, dives, inclines, dips, drops, sheer gradients, slants and hills. And to make your descent as perilous as possible, they’ve added some cool Boss Level gimmicks: sheet snow to obscure your view, high peaks to hamper breathing, ice to keep you unsteady and always on the verge of terminal velocity, dark glacial caverns and tunnels to navigate, ragged-tooth rocks to avoid and the use of a wing-suit to traverse crevasses and gaps.

EA were smart to use NASA’s topographical mapping data. These are real mountains you’re boarding, with the typically unreal SSX add-ons for ceaseless rails, or outsize jumps to perform those countless tricks – there’s even ample opportunity to perform stunts with the ally helicopter (once you’re at the right altitude). The gameplay philosophy of SSX is: race it, trick it, survive it. The last part of that three-pillar theory makes all the difference. I’ve played Amped 3, Stoked, SSX: Blur, so I kept expecting SSX to turn into something standard, but pretty soon I was forced to admit I’d never seen anything like it. Let me put it this way, the developers at EA have found a way to create exhilarated disbelief: the more life-threatening the descent the more fun it is. No other snowboarding game has ever fused jitteriness and courageousness in quite the way that this game does. Momentum is at the heart of snowboarding, it may not be fully acknowledged, but it’s true. In SSX it’s not only acknowledged, it’s exalted. It’s possibly one of the best games I’ve ever played.

[PS3, Xbox 360, PC]

By Damon Boyd

Published in Playboy South Africa January/February 2012