Why do I have to do heats? It seems like the times for them don't matter at all; I'll get 1st in the first or second one, then do my worst on the final round where it seems to matter. Is there some logic here?

Haven't played SSX3 before now... it's ok, but compared to SSX2012 it seems pretty archaic. Als,o doing the whole d-pad prewind thing seems incredibly awkward, but meh.

It sort of acted like a mini elimination tournament; the top three go to the next round, until the final, hardest round. You could easily restart a run if you wanted to at the bottom, in case you messed up.

But do the first two runs count for anything in the end? It sucks I can waste all my good tries the first two times to fail continuously on the last one.

And each run down is like 3 minutes, so doing each event takes like 10... which I guess ain't a lot overall, but it's a lot of repetition.

They count for absolutely nothing unless you don't get through then you have to restart all three heats.

It's not SO bad on Show Off events, if you come first in the first heat you go straight to the third heat. Unfortunately if you restart the second heat of any event at any time it throws you back into the first heat I believe. SSX3 was weird.

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It's been a loooooooooooooooong time - having sold my PS2, but retained all the SSX discs....and correct me if I'm wrong but I'm fairly certain for the tricking events you can restart during the third heat and remain in the third heat. It might even work for races, but it's been years since I've played, sooooo I could be entirely wrong. I'm not sure why I would remember such a thing if it didn't exist tho, haha.

I think the idea behind heats was to keep it a little bit grounded in reality, and have a semi-realistic competition style. I definitely remember these being the most annoying thing in the game, for all the reasons you stated - it's really freakin' annoying to mess up and have to redo all three heats. I remember a lot of times too just holding off on doing some of them until I could buy better gear and kick ass a little easier.

Having heats allows you to warm up on a track so that you can figure out your line before getting to the round that counts for a medal. I think that's nice. And then even if you do screw up the final heat, restarting puts you back at the final heat. Also nice.

Plus, it extends the gameplay. I mean SSX3 has, what, 8 races, 6 slopestyles, 3 pipes, and 3 big-airs? 20 events. That's with backcountry tracks counted twice. If the game only made you do one heat for each, you'd beat Conquer the Mountain in less than two hours. That'd be a lackluster amount of gameplay.

And like others said, it's kinda like a tournament thing.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a high score achieved in any heat goes on your records.

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