For some reason, an aura of cool surrounds those who snowboard; their stupid hats and insistence on using the most ridiculous phrases to describe their inane sport is excused because they can go down a snowy hill on a plank and stay upright for more than 30 seconds. Obviously we know the truth, but videogame developers can’t get enough of this ‘extreme’ culture, every winter ramming more and more snowboarding games down our over-stuffed gullets, insisting that we’d much rather be busting epic 19s on the slopes than doing anything else. Never a company to shy away from an overcrowded market place, Electronic Arts gives us SSX On Tour, the fourth in the series and the first to appear on the PSP.

Luckily, SSX On Tour is a sufficiently good game for us to forgive its forced snowboarding hipness, mixing the more realistic and mundane elements of the sport with the boisterousness of the EA Sports Big brand. It’s recognisable as snowboarding, but you’re not going to have to concern yourself with anything other than getting down the slopes and stomping awesome tricks.

As with the previous entries in the SSX series, the emphasis in On Tour is totally on the fun side of the sport, pretty much eliminating any aspect that could be considered simulation. This is arcade fun at its best, something that EA is concerning itself with more and more in order to make its titles accessible to the mass market. Out of all its titles, On Tour highlights this approach the most, with progress through the game guaranteed to pretty much anyone who picks up the PSP. This isn’t to say that it’s too easy – some challenges will require more than one attempt – but experts will probably find themselves challenging their own high scores rather than those set by the game.

For those who might see the end of the game sooner than they would have liked, EA has included an excellent four-player Wi-fi mode for you to while away some more hours. Being a PSP game this is simply set up with the Ad-Hoc mode and most of the events from the main game are available. Due to the short turnaround between the PSP and PS2 versions, there are no online multi-player or game-share options, which does limit the multi-player experience somewhat, but these features aren’t widely supported on the handheld anyway, so it’s not surprising.

Talking of the PS2 version, PSP On Tour is surprisingly close to its bigger brother, with only a few compromises noticeable. The biggest of these is, unsurprisingly, the control method. On the PS2 version the right analogue stick is used to control the spin of your character, while the face buttons are employed to perform grabs and the like. The PSP is of course stickless so you have to use the D-pad instead, which means that you’re that little bit slower to pull off gnarly tricks, which will ultimately reduce your scores. If you’ve played the PS2 version for any length of time you’ll probably curse this change, but if you’re new to On Tour it won’t bother you. On all other fronts the PSP version is almost a carbon copy of the home version, with everything just about the same as it was on the PS2, including the Tour mode.

The big new thing for On Tour is the addition of skiing, but as in the home version, the addition of an extra plank underfoot adds very little to the gameplay, with this variation playing much the same as the snowboard game. This is a shame and an issue we hope is addressed for the next SSX game. Although this can’t match the PS2 version for speed, it does a great job graphically.

SSX On Tour is a superb snowboarding game, but if you’ve already given it a thorough going-over on the PS2 it probably isn’t worth sparing it a second thought. However, if you’re new to the whole thing and are looking for a viable extreme alternative to Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, then this is about the only place to go on the PSP.

Jude Salmon