Jonny Moseley Mad Trix Ski-ing

Because of the likes of Hawks and Tricky, all mad stunt games have been associated with the boarding element, the urban side of the snow/street domain. This game aims to prove that in fact, skiers can be just as mad too. From this perspective, you have fairly much the same buttons as other games. The main difference being in this, that when jumping to a railslide, whereas in Tony Hawks you have to land on the rail to do the slide and then keep your balance manually, with Moseley if you jump for a slide and hit the triangle button, it pretty much locks you onto the slide, with no manual balance element. It is up to the individual player as to if this a good thing. On the plus side, you get to trick whilst in the slide, thus building up your score for the length of the slide and prepping for a big dismount. Or it is a bad thing as there is no human element once on the slide, thus making them attractive tricks to attempt, as unless you fluff the landing, you will get a score from it. However, to progress on, you need to enter the competition mode on slopestlye first and win the various cities in turn. These are won on a high score basis, with medals awarded during the event as you reach and breach the medal threshold. Once a certain score is achieved, then new levels are opened, along with new kit and players, allowing for more ability in certain areas of expertise.

When tricking in Moseley, there is a definite element of Max Payne to it. As you trick off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, you do not fall at a relative speed, you seem to enter a bullet time feel to the fall, allowing you to change tricks mid fall, thus building your score. It is a bit odd, but you get used to it fairly quickly enough. Landings, as in all the games, you mess them up, you get hurt. Unlike Hawks, you do not taint the snow or trees with blood, but you do get some very patronising commentary about bones crunching and “let’s just forget about that one”! The landings are not too hard to line up, so long as you get them in a vaguely correct landing pattern. However, you do land some that clearly you were miles away from and not some others that were lined up with a ruler, but that keeps you on your toes.

The races, in competition mode, are against the clock, forcing you to obviously learn better tricks in less time, but the courses themselves are very long, taking a good five minutes plus to get through, depending how hard you ride the clock for time, whilst tricking somewhere. The courses are not the best in layout, and can lead to confusion in places as to where to go, but sooner or later you hit a sign with arrows, indicating the correct direction. The question by this stage is whether you have wasted too long trying to find the right way. Down the course there are various power ups: skis to make you go faster, double and quadruple score bonuses and cookies. Ski through the cookie and then trick for max points. Jonny, as a kid, used to trick for cookies, hence the reason they are in the games and increase your score.

The graphics are fluid, if not the most riveting, however there is a fairly good feel of speed, although you do reach top speed very quickly. The backgrounds are a bit dull, the rocks looking like they are all covered in moss, with lots of spruce pines dotted around the place, along with an abundance of jumps. The music is very akin to the whole “rad” lifestyle, mainly thrash hip rock with the odd hip hop flavoured number thrown in to change the tempo. As mentioned previously, there are lot’s of commentary quotes as well, all of which can be turned on and off in a main menu. There is no autosave or load, not that they take long, but they are a fiddle in an age where most games are. The loading of the game is quite long and laborious as well, even when loading levels as well as the original boot up. Like most games that do take a bit of loading, there is loading scroll bar, whilst a static image is on the screen, but as it seems to be very jerky as it loads across the screen and I am not sure if it is such a good graphic to run whilst loading.

Overall this game is instantly playable and easy to pick up and master. Some might say too easy by comparison to similar games. I am not sure that just because it is on skis it is really that much different to Hawks and Tricky, considering the moves are surprisingly similar and if you can play those games, then you will be able to play this and play it well straight out the blocks. Everything about this is OK, nothing leaps out and slaps you.