Since snowboarding took off in such a big way a few years ago, it seems you don't hear much about regular snow skiing anymore outside of Olympic competition. Jonny Moseley (who you might recognize from recent Sprint wireless commercials) is doing his part to bring skiing back into the limelight. He's often recognized as the pioneer that brought extreme tricks to the sport. This leads in to the fact there aren't many video games that showcase snow skiing. In a attempt to remedy that situation, 3DO has brought out Jonny Moseley Mad Trix focusing on extreme tricks and competition. Unfortunately, this SSX clone is definitely not the game to launch the sport into video game notoriety.

The game opens with your choice of free skiing or going straight into competition. You can only free ski in areas that you've unlocked in competition mode, and of course right out of the box you only get two areas to run, the practice slope and San Francisco. The first thing you'll notice is how utterly weak the graphics are, not to mention blatantly ripped from SSX (along with every other facet of the game). During the fly bys before the race there is considerable pop in and some funky level of detail problems. The bumps in the terrain draw themselves in as they come closer, and the trackside details like trees get all warped and distorted. There are kicker ramps and rails littered throughout the course to trick off, but the slopestyle areas look more like a Tony Hawk street course than a big downhill snow area. The riders animate unnaturally and there is fair amount of slowdown during wipeouts.

The music isn't bad by my tastes. It's all licensed stuff, so it depends on your tastes, but there's a little bit of rap and a little bit of rock. Like I said, it fits the scene for me as it does in most extreme sport games. The sound effects are decent, but the announcer has got to go. He lacks any enthusiasm as he calls out the tricks and the combos. You feel more like your dad is telling you what trick you performed than some stadium announcer from an extreme skiing competition.

Well, the rest of the game isn't there either. There is only one goal in Mad Trix, and that's to rack up trick points. There's no racing and therefore never any other riders on the tracks. The only things you have to worry about are beating the scores to earn medals and doing it within the time limit. If you've played SSX, you'll be right at home here. The control scheme is identical all the way down to having the grabs on the shoulder buttons. To perform some of the bigger tricks, you can preload the directional buttons for flips and spins. They use the square button for tweaking grabs, and the ramps that you get air off of even have the red paint on the snow.

And then come the problems that make this game so unfun. First of all, there is no sense of speed. The skiers run down the slopes at a snails pace, and one can hardly tell the difference between 10 mph and 55 mph. But then again, what would you need speed for anyway? Within seconds of leaving the starting gate you can perform a triple back flip just by preloading the jump and down button, on flat ground no less. This is what it's like down the whole course. You barely get much more air off a kicker ramp then you do just by jumping off the ground. The courses don't help. They're wide open and flat in most places, which means there's very little skiing and just a whole lot of tricking. Since there's no competition outside of amassing a bunch of trick points, the whole ride down the area is filled with jump, trick, jump, trick, grind, jump, trick. Where's the variety?

There are some people who are against borrowing ideas and rehashing games on principal alone, but I content that some great games are enhancements of the original. So, I wouldn't have had a problem with Mad Trix "borrowing" heavily from SSX if they took it to a new level. But, here we are a year and a half after that game hit the shelves and Mad Trix has only managed to take a step back in every conceivable category. The control isn't broken, but everything else from the competition to the course design and graphics are boring and poorly executed. I was intrigued and maybe a little excited at seeing a snow skiing game come out with the potential to expand on SSX's structure, but what has arrived I could not in good conscious recommend to anyone.