The Hunt Begins
So where do high scores come in? Well, that’s the fun part. The first few runs of my SSX routine usually embody what I described in the above paragraph, and it’s glorious. My hands feel loose, my in-game persona made it down in style, and I placed in the top bracket of the competition. That is, unless I didn’t. That’s where the scores come in. That’s when I start looking at them.
Even if a particular drop has upwards of many hundreds of riders who have logged scores that day, the game only shows you the score you need to break into each bracket, and the player with that score who you need to beat. Once you break into the top bracket, you’re also allowed to see the top score for the entire rider pool. Because of this limited peek into the whole of the competition as opposed to a massive leaderboard, the few names you get to attach to the numbers you’re chasing become real-life opponents. That is, real-life in the world of the game, which you’ve presumably for fun accepted as real. You know, because people do that.
The beauty of this whole system is that with each passing attempt to try and break into the Diamond bracket, the less I focus on fun and style and flying and nature, and the more my attention narrows into a singular beam directed squarely at the player whose score I am chasing.
In a recent Global Event I played on Fast Forward, which is essentially the bottom third of the game’s longest drop Serenity, I had the most extreme example of this phenomenon to date since I bought the game. Serenity is a drop I usually score well on no problem, but for whatever reason cramming a high score of 19 million or better into Fast Forward’s short duration is something I was struggling immensely with. At this moment — the place where determination, frustration, and real-life competition meet — many videogame experiences begin to break down. The fun factor makes a quick exit, the chances of success seem low, and most of all, the feeling of any of it being remotely real is sucked away entirely. It just becomes an unfair game that I can’t beat because some jerk on the other end has no life and logged a crazy high score. Yeah, well, you won’t catch me being like that kid. No way, I’m done.
Except, that doesn’t happen. I can’t see the 25 riders who scored ahead of me, I just see the one number between my current score and the one that lumps me in the top tier of SSX players. For all practical intents and purposes, being in that bracket means I’m very, very good at the game. And be it Super Smash Bros. or Call of Duty, that’s something that feels great to achieve, if you can achieve it. It’s precisely because your goal is always within reach that SSX never forces you to give in to frustration and annoyance. Instead, you react the way your in-game counterpart might. The 12 million points you just scored on what felt like the run of your life is still a whole 7 million shy of the rider you need to beat in order to hang with the best of the best. 7 million shy. “How on earth is he pulling that off?” It’s not hard to imagine your rider watching video of the opponent, wondering in complete consternation at how the laws of physics have been bent in such impossible ways. Though the scores are ever present, they’re simply representations of more meaningful concepts, and the 7 million points between me and “MrMcPot420” aren’t just points. They’re the five additional super-uber tricks (an actual in-game term, for the record) my opponent was able to squeeze into a three-minute run without racking up a “no flow” penalty, still maintaining a 20x multiplier, and to top it all off, hurtling off of a massive, hard-to-reach jump while performing a signature uber-trick and wingsuiting across the finish line. How do I know he showboated at the end? The game lets you see your opponent’s ghost as you race. Like I said – watching the videotape.
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