Wakeboarding Unleashed
Skateboarding is not a crime. In fact, enthusiasts have taken it to new heights with snowboarding and are making waves with wakeboarding, complete with star performances by such luminaries as Shaun Murray.
Only Possible on Your Mac
Wakeboarding Unleashed features all those elements as well as the kind of gameplay features found only in a computer game: tube-riding swimmers you wipe out to complete a goal, rails that stick out of the water for you to slide along as you pull off combos, and obstacles such as jetskiers who drive dangerously close.
Most of the nine environments available for your wakeboarding fun, such as The Boneyard (a naval ship graveyard) and Ocean World (a waterlogged amusement park), spring from the minds of designers who were clearly told to forget about reality and focus on the ultimate experience. Even the few based on real places, such as Venice’s waterways, allow you to do things you’d never be able to do there.
However, the seven wakeboarders featured in the game, including the eponymous Shaun Murray, were drawn from the real pro ranks of the sport. Each of them sports strengths and weaknesses you should take into account before deciding who to use in a certain environment. For example, an athlete with well-honed aerial skills will do best pulling off airborne tricks while a pro with exceptional balance should ride the rails as long as she can.
Solo and Two-Player Wakeboarding
As in other extreme sports games published by Aspyr, you can take your favorite wakeboarder through a career, beefing up her ability scores as you complete challenges, or you can simply go for a free ride, having fun without worrying about the need to accomplish tasks. (Note, however, that you can only free ride in the environments unlocked so far in career mode.)
Free rides also offer the opportunity to pilot the boat through any of available levels and explore it to learn its secrets. In one of the two-player modes, co-op, you can control the boat while your friend wakeboards (or vice-versa). Each level offers a variety of challenges geared toward two players working together.
The other three two-player modes feature head-to-head competition. In tug-o-war, each player has a length of rope and shortens his opponent’s rope as he pulls off tricks. First player to run out of rope loses. In trick attack, the player with the highest score at the end of a preset time limit wins. And H.O.R.S.E., the classic basketball game, comes to wakeboarding as each player tries to one-up the other’s tricks and become the first to collect the letters.
Wakeboarding’s inventors probably never realized how far it could go as they perfected their boards and tried to drum up interest in their new sport, so here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor of Mac gaming’s rapidly growing extreme sports genre. Someday you’ll be able to look back and say “I remember when there was just one wakeboarding game and we were happy to have that. Now there are ten of them!”
Watch Out For That Rail. Fill the “Special” meter and get access to extra moves, including the ability to perform tricks in slow motion.
Get Your Groove On. In Career mode, your “Groove” meter depletes unless you keep it filled by executing fancy tricks. If it completely empties, your session ends.
 |
Wakeboarding Unleashed Media |  |
||
 |
|
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
System Requirements:
 | Mac OS X version 10.2.6 or higher |
| 700MHz PowerPC G4 processor or higher |
| 256MB of RAM or higher |
| 580MB of hard disk space |
| 32MB 3D graphics card (minimum of ATI Radeon 7500 or NVIDIA GeForce 2 series) |
If you liked these games, check out:
Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4
Each of the seven pros in the game starts career mode with their skill points weighted toward certain areas. As you complete goals, you earn points that you can use to enhance their skills, up to a maximum of 10 points in each of 7 areas: jump height, hang time, turning, air control (how fast you can move while airborne), rail balance, carve balance (your ability to keep from wiping out during a manual) and switch (your skill at pulling off tricks in switch stance, which is the opposite of the wakeboarder’s normal stance).
Shaun Murray:
