GamersInfo.net

Especially to me – someone who is not an “Extreme Sports Game” kind of guy. I like football, baseball, and hockey. I don’t have any problems with things like wakeboarding or, for that matter, surfing or skate boarding, but they ain’t my thing, if you know what I mean.

But hey – I’ve got a friend with a boat, and we take him wakeboarding behind it on a regular basis. I’ve even driven the boat for him while he was doing it. So I figured what the heck, I’ll review the game.

Let’s go over the basics, first:

You pick out a wake boarder. There are seven of them to choose from, all modeled after real life pros. I’m led to believe that there are three more available to unlock, but I’ll freely admit that I’m not good enough to unlock any of them yet.

Then it’s up to you to go through the 11 stages. You start off at Lake Powell (one of my favorite lakes from a different water based game, but I digress) and work your way through the various levels.

A wakeboard is a small, vaguely surfboard shaped board that you stand on while a boat pulls you around the course. Using the wake of the boat, as well as the various obstacles, devices, etc., located around each course, you can do all kinds of tricks and (in my case, especially) face plants into the water.

To get to some areas, you can also drop the rope that holds you to the boat, which causes you to lose speed but be more free in what you’re doing. A push of the button lets the boat throw you back the rope (and don’t worry, as long as the rope can make it there, you’ll catch it).

That’s basically it. In the basic mode you’re trying to keep your groove meter from emptying by doing repeated tricks and such. It drops when do things like face plants.

There are a number of different modes you can play, as well, including some multiplayer. Career Mode is just that; you follow the career of your wake boarding persona. You’ll be asked to do a certain number of tricks, do tricks for TV cameras, hit certain gaps or obstacles, pick up numbers in order, or even drive the boat for some assignments.

Multiplayer features a co-op mode where one player controls the boat and the other does the wake boarding. (I particularly liked this mode, especially since the usual gaps and such moved from the regular game for this one.) Tug-of-war has you competing against your erstwhile compatriot by doing tricks – the more you do in a row, the shorter his rope gets.

Let’s talk about the graphics. This game is a bit older – late 2003, if I remember correctly – but to be honest, I was surprised with the graphics. They were good!

The game starts off with live video of the various people in the game. Instead of the music you might expect from an “extreme sports game” (i.e., some kind of nu metal hard rock head banging “that’s so extreme!” music you’d expect from a Mountain Dew commercial) there’s a variety of tunes from bands like the Pixies, Van Halen, J. Giles Band and Love and Rockets. I was flat out surprised to hear the soundtrack, and I really liked it. The rest of the sounds are rather “eh,” in the game. You’ve got your standard boat motor sound, some splashing, the sound of my head bouncing against a rock or six. It’s nothing spectacular, but you’ll probably be busy rocking out and…uh…well, maybe waking out? … to care.

But back to the graphics. The water looks great in the game. A lot of games get too “busy” with the water graphics, so intent on modeling every single little white cap that the boat, the tides, the six year olds learning how to swim might create that you can’t see the surface for the waves. In Wakeboarding Unleashed, though, the water looks great, and the physics of your wakeboard on the water seems to fit perfectly. It made it easy to figure out how to do things such as jump up in the air off the boat’s wake.

The rest of the graphics are good. The one you’ll probably notice the most after the water is your character model, which isn’t as spectacularly good, but is still completely recognizable while not zombie like in the “almost but not quite realistic enough” mode. The landscapes and other graphics are – to be honest – close enough for government work. Except when you face plant into the side of a decommissioned battleship, you won’t be staring at them hard enough (or for a long enough time) for it to really matter.

What a game like this really comes down to is two things – do you like this genre or style of game, and is it a good game.

Well, this is a good game. I’m more than happy to say that. I enjoyed playing it.

As for the first one, well, that depends on you. Personally, I’ll be placing the CD-ROMs for this game off to the side and probably loaning them to a friend instead of playing it any more, because it’s not my style of PC game. But it’s also out for Xbox and PS2, and I’d have to admit – I’d play it there. And if you like the skateboarding/ skiing/ wakeboarding/ surfing genre of games, you’ll definitely like this one.