Since there's no release date for 1080 GC, if you're looking for a snowboarding title for GameCube, EA's SSX Tricky is going to be your only choice at the US launch. I've played the PS2 version a couple of times and was pretty impressed, and this is pretty much more of the same. Not that that's a bad thing.

Supposedly this game is 90% complete, but it didn't look like it. There was some slow down, and I didn't see any snow effects from the boards while turning. Other than that, graphically the game looked pretty decent. The environments were nice and the racer animations were excellent. The racers would taunt each other, as well as wave to you. That I thought was pretty cool.

I had a hard time getting used to the controls. The analog stick controls the boarder, D-pad controls rotations and flips, A = jump, B = Turbo, and L + R control grabs. At least this is what I could figure out from what I played. The controls weren't as tight as I hoped they would be, and in the beginning it was difficult to pull off tricks. After a while I got a little more used to it, but overall it wasn't as tight in comparison to a game like Wave Race: Blue Storm.

The course that was available was extremely long, and had plenty of different routes to get to the bottom. It's all about big jumps and tricks. If the controls were a little better I think SSX would be a lot more fun. I am hoping EA cleans this game up a lot before release.

I'm a big snowboarding fan, and SSX for PS2 was a lot of fun. It was probably the only game that almost got me to get a PS2 (and no I don't have one). Fortunately for EA, they've got a couple months to clean it up. I'm hoping that they don't rush it, and take the time to make sure SSX Tricky is as solid on the GameCube as it is on the PS2.