Date: 7/3/03
Author: Clay McCoy

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Are you as hungry for a wakeboarding video game as I was? Do you play other extreme sports games and try your best to simulate moves that you would like to do on a wakeboard? Well, the good news is that a wakeboarding game is finally available. The bad news is that it is the first real attempt at a wakeboarding game so you may still be waiting for some of the game play that you have wished for. I have been playing the Xbox version of Activision's Wakeboarding Unleashed Featuring Shaun Murray since it came out and here are some of my thoughts about it.

A Little History

There have been a few other attempts at wakeboarding games that were simply horrible. There were some PC games that I never heard about anyone actually being able to run on their computer. Then there was Burstrick Wakeboarding for the Sony Playstation. This game was all about entering long button combinations in a limited time in order to do whatever trick the computer wanted to do. With competition like this, the bar was not set very high. Now there is Wakeboarding Unleashed, which takes the popular Tony Hawk Pro Skater experience and slaps some wakeboarding on it. It definitely puts any previous wakeboarding titles to shame.

First Impressions

If you are already into wakeboarding, one of the most exciting aspects of the game is just seeing familiar names, boats, equipment and tricks. The graphics look great. The environments are detailed and show a lot of variety. The movement of the riders is fluid and accurate most of the time. Small recognizable characteristics of each rider are even thrown in.

The game play is genuinely fun, and there are a lot of diverse challenges in each level. You will find typical challenges such as beating a high score, doing certain tricks, hitting a number of specified markers or collecting a series of numbers, which force you to take a difficult path. There are also some innovative challenges like a fixed camera tournament mode, some boat racing, and challenges where you recklessly fling the rider at some remotely placed target. The latter type was especially fun, but I did feel guilty for all the abuse that I put Parks through.

The challenges range in difficulty as well. There is usually something easy, something impossible and something just plain fun waiting to be done while you are on your way to unlocking everything in the game. There is a fair amount of thought in the level design so the challenges remain interesting. If you go along with the developers' vision of wakeboarding, then you are going to have a good time.

Game Play

There were a few aspects of the game play that I found disappointing. Mainly, there is surprisingly little "wake" action for a wakeboarding game. You are mostly sliding around and doing tricks on obstacles. A lot of the time, there are half pipe-shaped obstacles which you really don't see much of in wakeboarding. If you genuinely want to do tricks off the wake, you are going to have a hard time finding room because most of the environments are too tight with all of the obstacles that you are expected to hit.

The tricks themselves are not implemented as I had hoped. We are still in the world of arbitrary button combinations. The moves are completely predefined and you can't add any variety to them. That works in a skateboarding game, but not in a sport where you are inverted as much as not. Here you need to give the player full control of that axis as well. It would be much more satisfying if the control setup was more like some of the newer snowboarding games where you can combine your flipping and spinning as you see fit. It would be nice to be able to even throw in some grabs to customize a move if you want. As it is, the limited trick ability gets boring very quickly and all the button tapping makes the nice analog controls we all have useless. I would like to see more aspects of real wakeboarding introduced into the control scheme like the use of a progressive edge rather than just double tapping towards the wake to get maximum pop.

When you do a trick, I would like to see the right name pop up on the screen. Though most of the predefined tricks look correct, the names are almost all wrong. I hope that people aren't trying to learn about wakeboarding from this game. This is disappointing because this would have been an easy one to get right.

The spinning is the most fun movement because it looks very fluid and you have complete control over the rotation. The grabs are also well done, however if you spin while grabbing you are likely to get some movement that obviously defies physics. An indy grabbed spin looks natural, but while grabbing slob the character is twirling around above the rope. On a method spin, the rider actually travels through the rope.

There is also a feature that allows you to let go of the rope and explore the environment. There is a certain amount of time before your momentum runs out, but there are ways to get around that. I was determined to hate this feature because it is so exaggerated, but it is just too much fun to hate. Actually, everything that you can do in the game is extremely exaggerated like in all extreme sports games. I found that to only add to the enjoyment, and, if you pretend that your character is Keith Lyman, then it isn't all that exaggerated.

Despite my criticism of the playability, not too much fun is lost over some of the shortcuts taken. As I said, the game is not even geared towards doing typical tricks like you would in real life. It is about huge air, crazy stunts, and completing challenges. It is undeniably fun as a whole, but it would be nice if some of the playability issues were addressed in a future release.

Other Features

One of the best features of the game is the customizable soundtrack. Sure, some music comes with the game, but you will quickly grow tired of it. It tends to be older recognizable tunes that are fun to hear again at first, but not the kind of stuff that anyone wants to listen to when they ride. Thankfully, you can put your own music on your Xbox and listen to it. The interface on this is not quite as nice as your mp3 player, but it sure is nice to be able to listen to your own music. A quick tip that I have learned for getting music on an Xbox without the original CD is that it likes CD-RW's much better than CD-R's.

The multi-player aspect is a lot of fun if you have someone to play against. Unfortunately, there is no online play provided, which would have greatly extended the replay value of this game. There are the common HORSE and competition type games. There are also more original games like tug-of-war where the rope length changes depending on how you compare to the other player, and a co-op game where one person drives and one rides. The co-op is actually very fun because you can do whatever you can imagine; hit obstacles with the boat, run over the wakeboarder, pull them in reverse. The possibilities are endless, and so are the bugs brought about by doing things that the game designers probably never intended. This can be a lot of fun if you have other people to play with.

One obvious feature this game is missing is the player customization that has made similar titles so much fun. It would be nice to be able to change the look of a character. And it would certainly add to the game to be able to pick the tricks that you want to do and assign them to certain button combinations.

Summary

This game may not be as much of an accurate portrayal of wakeboarding as you might want if you are really hard core about the sport, but if you can put those reservations aside, it is certainly a lot of fun. It is not quite as polished as some of the other extreme sports games out there, but it is not really fair to compare them because this is the first real attempt at a wakeboarding game. So if you are into wakeboarding, go out and get the game. You will enjoy it and, hopefully, it will lead to even better wakeboarding games to play in the future. Just don't forget to go outside and get some real wakeboarding in.

Pros