I was just thinking about how freestyle was before the smurphy trick was found, how different it would be, how much more difficult it would be.

Its been said that ssx3 was too easy, but in alot of ways, we here at merqurycity have played with a different set of rules than was intended, but those rules were included in the game (smurphy, wormholes, etc) so of course its all fair play.

Gondee, maybe you can help me out here...I have a vid of you, somewhere in this 100GB mess of SSX files, a movie you yourself put out early on, I think it took place on perp and you did something completely nuts, like 11 or 12 different monster tricks....... any chance for a link to that vid? I have the vid actually but can't upload it cause well, i haven't used a mcity acct in a couple years....

I just wanted to post that vid so ppl could see what the face of ssx3 freestyle would have been if not for the smurphy trick -- imho a much more difficult way to do freestyle in ssx3.

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Yeah, I remember that run by gondee - it was good looking, but nowhere near as hard as a fast-X-X run. He did the 6 different MTs allowed, then another set of fast spinning jumps with regular ubers until the MTs could be repeated again for full score. Completely smurphy-free, but not harder than the hardcore techniques that eventually developed from the smurphy trick.

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Are you a patriot? Then spend 1 hour reading this site.

your right...i just watched it, and yep 6 monster tricks. im no longer as impressed, guess i have to blame in on a faulty memory unit. getting older sucks.

actually i am still impressed because he put that vid out really early. (obviously before the smurphy trick was found out, and that was found out pretty quickly after ssx3 was released).

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Aww, that hurts my feelings. Don't worry too much about it LB, we all do that when we remember stuff. Your feelings are remembered as they once were, maybe even magnified, without benefit of perspective of time. That's why you always remember the "old times" with fondness even though it may not have actually been as good as you remembered.

FWIW, the run was very good in the context of when it was released, it was ahead of even what PD could do, by several hundred thousand points. And the fact that I ran the website for SSX and had the top score might have contributed something to the 'legend' of the run. But in the long run, no, it doesn't hold a candle to anything anyone has done in the top tiers since then.

That was about a month or two after SSX 3 had just come out. FBX and I just took what we knew from the previous games and applied it to SSX3, FBX was the one who discovered it was ten tricks before the trick meter reset. From there it was just a matter of using Monster Tricks to their fullest - you could have made some refining to the run, but basically that was the start of how 'good' a run could be if it was in the "spirit" of how the SSX 3 Developers intended the game to be played. For the time it was pretty advanced, but compared to the techniques that RE, Igloo and Chaos created, it wasn't nearly as skilled. It only took me a few days to get the run down. It was just, at the time, no one was at the same speed FBX and I were when it came to breaking down the ins and outs of the system because we had our little community of SSX elites who were tackling it. I set a 650K record on Much-2-Much online which blew the second hand score away, but that wasn't even close to the best run possible under normal conditions. It was just ahead of what the average person online was doing without the techniques developed here.

Once our knowledge filtered out online, all the people were capable of getting good scores. Knowledge is power after all, that's how all of us are able to get so good. And to be honest, I'm not a protective score-holder. I'm far more interested in disseminating information than holding onto it, that's why I released the video instead of holding onto my score for a little while longer.

As corny as you could argue that Smurphy and other tweaks like the rail hops to get up your trick count were, it really extended the life of the game quite a bit. I think SSX 3 wouldn't have had the life it did if the point ceiling topped out at 3 mil or a little extra on Perpendiculous, if all the top scores were separated by 100K or less. Without Smurphy that was the beginning of the end - the next step would have been to include igloo's rail hop tricks to get your trick count up to 30x as fast as possible, but the basic "6 Monster Tricks, 4 filler tricks, then 6 Monsters again" would have been the prevalent technique for all the superpipes. Then after the high scores would have been separated by a few trick counts, or whatever individual technique someone had to use to build a few extra thousand points, the track would be maxed out. Not as much fun, I don't think in the long run.

In case the general masses wanted to know what movie he's talking about, I found it and uploaded it to the server (cuz I am proud of this run for as advanced as it was at the time, even if it doesn't hold a candle to the scores now. ) It's a nice "What If?" sort of thing - what freestyle would have been like had the developers patched up the hole in the trick system that allowed for Smurphy to take place. And then maybe to be glad they overlooked that.

http://www.merqurycity.com/masters/movi ... 262mil.wmv

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