002 – Town & Country Surf Designs Wood and Water Rage
Year: 1988 | Publisher: LJN | Developer: Atlus
Sports | Video
Surf Gorilla or Cat & Skateboarding Tiki Man or Pompadour…. what could be better?
Town & Country Surf Designs became popular in my area right around the time of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But T&C had already been around since 1971; long before the video game. Being an internationally recognized surf board manufacturer based in Pearl City, Hawaii seems like a no brainer. But it would be Da Boys (now known as the Thrilla Krew) that would bring them pop culture fame. Thank you, Steve Nazar.
Title Screen: Static and more static. The title screen itself is pretty basic but does everything it’s supposed to. Uses the brand graphics. Gives you really high level credits. Tells you to push start. It doesn’t give you the full name of the game, which is a little odd. But there is also an ocean sound playing in the background. It’s really just a white noise / static generator but it is loud and a little annoying. So press start quickly.
Menu: There are three game modes with the option of single or two player. Here we can choose Street Skate, Big Wave, or as with the full title of the game, a Wood and Water Rage which is a combination of the two. I’m not entirely sure why they give you the options. But it might have to do with the ending of the game, challenge modes, or things of that nature which we will get into later.
Characters: The Thrill Krew in the game consists of Thrilla Gorilla (the most famous and leader of the Krew), Cool Joe, Wave Warrior, and Kool Kat. Thrilla and Kat surf with Joe and the Warrior as their partners respectively. Unfortunately there’s no mix and match. It would have been nice to be able to choose your team, but maybe the technology wasn’t there, the game was rushed, the code was bad, or any that’s just what the developer wanted.
Street Skate Session: There are really only five lengths to this mode. They start off as short distances and get longer, but after the fifth round there just more obstacles and no more distance. There are a couple things to notice that increase the difficulty besides the obstacles. There’s a timer. You start each round with only 60 seconds on the clock. There is no way to add time. When you crash, the clock stops and you’re set back a little distance, but not much. You also have a life meter made up of Yin Yang symbols. You start the level with a certain amount and if you don’t hit anything, it will fill up and eventually stop the clock. Every time you hit something, however, you lose two life points. As the levels get longer and harder, it is important not to hit anything otherwise there is no way to finish the round. You get points by picking up coins, jumping over holes, or grinding on tall rails (only one per level). Really, the goal should just be to get to the end as thee just get harder and harder.
Big Wave Encounter: When I started playing this game I though the skate session would be easy and the surf encounter would be hard. And for the first round of each, that might be true. But where as the Skate Session gets longer and more difficult, the Wave Encounter doesn’t really. The controls are what really get you. They are not intuitive at all. It took multiple attempts before I could figure out how to stay ahead of the wave let alone earn points. The key is UP, DOWN, and RIGHT. Not just RIGHT. And LEFT is almost entirely unnecessary. Obstacles include jumping piranhas, planes, a guy on an tube or boogie board, birds, and of course the wave itself. There is only ever one obstacle obstacle on the screen at any time so they aren’t that difficult to dodge. You get points for tricks or for picking up bananas in the ocean. Weird. You can perform tricks at the top of the wave and quickly spinning back down, jumping the wave and landing, or riding just inside the crest of the wave. As you move to the right, eventually you will see the pier which marks the end of the level.
The game doesn’t end. Like many of the older games and game systems like pitfall, asteroids, pac man, and the like, it just gets more and more difficult. And it’s not an endurance game like pinball where you just have to keep from dying. I have seen videos of people getting to level 15 on the Wood and Water Rage. I made it pretty far on just the Big Wave Encounter. It just goes and goes. The menu mode works well especially or two player mode if you just want to get some challenges in. Or if you want to get some practice in before a full Rage.
All in all, this game is really fun. But it has very little replay value for me. Once I got about five round in on either mode or ten rounds on the dual mode, I lost interest. But that’s ok. Knowing what I do know, I could really push myself to get as far as possible on each mode and push the score. But I’m not really playing against anyone but myself. And once you master the few tricks it offers, the game gets boring really quick. Totally worth it to play through a couple of times though. Time to hang ten, brah.
Erik
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