Ok,
so it’s not an underwater game. It is an above water game, and when you crash
(which is often), your boat and skier fall under the water, so that’s close
enough in my book. The concept is simple enough, you guide your boat through the
water avoiding obstacles and pulling your skier through obstacles also. You
control the skier in a backwards motion, if your boat goes right, the skier goes
right, etc. However, that’s where the simplicity ends.
Control in the game is simply put, terrible. Trying to navigate through obstacles while trying to keep your skier from running into things is next to impossible. You can also make your skier jump ramps, but doing that, because of the horrible control, almost always ends in your boat crashing into the ramp and your skier ending up in that all too familiar underwater area. To add to the difficulty (WTF?!), they’ve placed hidden (YES, HIDDEN!) rocks and sand bars all over the place, so you’ll be going along and hit nothing, but die anyhow. You can control the skier with the left and right buttons of the 7800 joystick, but I found that even more difficult than just controlling him with your boat. The manual actually says it all: "It is possible to live to a very ripe old age without ever seeing level three." They don’t mention that it’s possible to turn the game off when I want to, or hit it with a really nice hammer, but that’s another story. ;-) This could have easily been a 2 player game, where one player controls the boat and one controls the skier and it would have been 200% more fun.
Graphics
in the game are nothing special. They aren’t horrible, but not up to the level
of some other 7800 games. I suppose I’m being harsh, but the boat isn’t very
detailed, the skier looks too much like a blob, the ramps don’t look like
ramps at all (I didn’t know they were ramps until I went over one by accident)
and the rest of the graphics are just blah. I guess I’m expecting too much
from a game by Froggo.
All this being said, however, this is one of those games that’s fun enough to be considered almost addicting, and if the control were better, it would be incredibly addicting! Another major thing that stops this from being one of those addicting games is that when you crash, you have to start over again at the beginning. This takes away from the fun of any game, though, if nothing else, you learn slowly how to get through each little portion of the specific level.
I suppose it’s fun in it’s different concept - I mean, how many other water skiing games have been made? The concept alone is reason enough to own this game, just don’t expect to be playing it every day.
