Surf’s Up With Kelly

Bruce Von Stiers

Activision’s O2 division has done it again. The programmers have come up with a killer game. I checked out this new game on PS2 and was wiped out. Literally. You see, this new extreme game is about surfing. And it features one of the world’s premiere surfers. The game is called Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer.

There are two things that I liked about the game right away. The first was that there are a lot of live video clips in the game. It has over an hour’s worth of surfing footage, some of which was taken from Kelly’s Pipeline Sessions special on ESPN. The second thing I liked was the soundtrack. There were bands like Funky lowlifes and Thunderball. Psychedelic Soul from Soul Hooligan and Solaris Stomp from the Space Cossacks were featured songs in the game. There were also songs from Shur I Kan, Greyboy, Jeremy Kay and a bunch of other musicians.

Another thing that is very nice about the game is that it uses a proprietary wave engine. The team in charge of developing the wave engine did a great job. The waves look as realistic as you can have for a game, and the surfer interaction is the best I’ve seen in my somewhat limited experience.

Like the Tony Hawk games from Activision, this title is grounded in a sports career. You work your way up through the various titles to become the world’s champion surfer. Pick a surfer to play as, select the surfboard to use and start surfing. Each surfer has some specific skills that you can tap into and the surfboards themselves have certain attributes that can make your surfing experience cooler and winning easier.

Tricks? Yes, there are a whole bunch of tricks that can be performed. These tricks earn you points and allows you to move on up, getting closer to that championship title. The more tricks that can be performed, the better. There are face tricks that take place on the face of the wave. There are also air tricks that call for both your surfer and the surf board to be out of the water at some point. Then there are tricks in the Tube. The tube is when a wall of water surrounds you and basically you are in a big tube of water.

You will also need to be checking the Balance and Wave meters that are on the screen. The Tube mode will need to keep your surfer upright enough not to fall of the board. The Wave Meter will let you know which way the wave is breaking and the direction the surfer should aim the board.

The surfers that have signed up to be part of the game are pretty notorious in their own rights. There is Tom Carroll and Tom Curren. Then there is Bruce Irons, Rob Machado and Kalani Robb. Donavon Frankenreiter, Nathan Fletcher and Lisa Anderson all surf in the game too. At age 33, Anderson has racked up more than her share of National Scholastic Surfing Association trophies. Tom Curren has a famous surfer dad, Pat, and used to hang out a lot with the other Tom in the game. The bios for each surfer are in the game manual. In Kelly’s bio we find out that he claimed his fifth Pipe Masters victory in 1999. The surfers have been digitized and rendered very well for the game.

Surfer dudes have always gotten kind of a bad rap in movies and such. From watching the video clips in the game, you will learn that these folks aren’t the airheads you might think they are. Sure they love to surf, but there is more intelligence found here than some tanned blonde surfer saying “yah, dude” all of the time. The programmers have made sure that although the spirit of beaches and the surfing life is integrated into the game, there are actually strong visual effects, intuitive actions and good character movements.

The game has some specific goals that have to be obtained in order to move on. Some are kind of silly, like doing a bozo trick to get on the cover of a magazine, but others help make your surfer compete better and win more.

There is a tutorial to get you started, but then you are on your own. On the PS2 version of the game, you will have to be fairly adept at using the controller to do a trick. As I have two left thumbs and not enough body English, my game skills kind of suck. But I was able to do a few nose grabs and perform a halfway decent One Hand Roof Drag. Other tricks include a funky one called Judo Air and a Tail Grab like the one used in Tony Hawk.

Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer brings the extreme sports video game genre to its next level. It has some incredible graphics and the gameplay is varied enough that you won’t think you’re playing Tony Hawk on the water. The music that was picked out for the game is great and the narration of the various elements by Slater himself is a nice touch.

Look for Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer at your local video game retailer. You can also order it online from Activision at www.activision.com.