Miyamoto Shrine > Nintendo Gamecube > Waverace: Blue Storm Review

I cant get over what a cool game this is, it's addictive, it's original, it's good looking and it's fun. This should be the game that sells the system because in my opinion it is the best out of the three Japanese launch titles, although some people would argue to the death on Monkey Ball's part (god, I hate that game).

For those of you who don't own the original Waverace on N64 (myself included) I will fill you in on the rules of the game. It's not just your average racing game but instead on water, you have to navigate yourself around buoys. You go right around the red ones and left around yellow ones and you can only miss a maximum of five buoys before you are disqualified. The buoys add a lot of strategy to the game, even though they calve you a path to follow in the water that doesn't mean you have to follow it exactly, you could miss at maximum four buoys to cut corners and gain distance from the racers behind you.

A new feature added since the N64 version is the ability to use a speed boost after you've correctly passed five buoys. Using a boost can either make or break you, I usually use boosts on straights or not at all because if you try and go around a sharp turn while boosting or accidentally clip something you go flying off your jet ski and are almost guaranteed to lose the race. Which brings me to the difficulty - this game is hard! On the expert course you have to come in the top three on almost every race and the AI seem to cheat worse than in Mario Kart 64! When you're taking tight corners around all your memorized buoys someone'll come and ram you right into a rock and while you're climbing back on your jet ski everyone will overtake you, and on expert that's almost certain last place.

The racers themselves are very well designed and all have there own theme music, commentator and styles. Nigel Calver has the best turning in the game while Ricky Winterborn can do the best stunts for example. My personnel favourite is Nigel Calver because you don't need speed if you can tightly turn around the buoys and know your way around the course, you're also less likely to crash with him which is a necessity.

This game has got one hell of a kicking soundtrack, it's a healthy mix or rock, techno, acoustic guitar (Aspen Lake, oh yes) and there's even a bit of normal tune driven Nintendo music in there. This game has something for everyone and does wonders on a surround sound system, definitely one of the better game soundtracks to come out of Nintendo. The sound effects are great too, all the menus are sounds of water droplets hitting the water and the sounds of the waves crashing during the game is juts unbeatable, NST must have spent two weeks living on a boat to record all these water sounds.

The graphics are actually quite average, the character models are nice and all the clipping problems from E3 seem to have be fixed but the waves are only occasionally amazing. The physics of the water is what is truly amazing, the water realistically crashes against objects and is actually affected by your jet ski carving through it, rather than just putting some kind of frothing animation behind the jet skis. The waves add a lot of problems to the game that you wouldn't have found otherwise, for example if you stay behind other jet skis you'll get knocked about by the waves they cause. A really impressive aspect of the water is how it is completely different in every course. Aspen Lake has calm water that starts to quite violently bob up and down when you go screaming through it where as Southern Island has quite huge waves at times, screenshots of it in a thunder storm have often been mistaken for 'Tsunami Mode'!

The weather is another physics wonder in motion. There's a total of five different weather conditions: sunny, cloudy, cloudy/rainy, raining and thunder storm. Obviously thunder storm is the most impressive with the rain crashing down on the water creating ripples, a really big water height with most obstacles underneath the water, huge waves crashing all the over the place, lightning lighting up the clouds in the sky and to add to all that the lightning sometimes strikes the course creating new obstacles! In Aspen Lake on the last lap lightning strikes a tree and it falls onto the lake taking up most of your space so you have to be quick to dodge it. In the main tournament mode you can actually choose the order you race each course but you cannot choose the weather conditions, they are random each time you start a tournament. This adds more strategy to the game, some levels are harder to beat in certain weather conditions than others, so picking the right track for the right weather is important.

The tricks are back from the standard summersault to a barrel roll. This time depending on which trick you do you can add to your turbo meter and get extra turbos to use during a race. Unfortunately most tricks slow you down so that you can get over taken easily and if you go up a ramp without doing a stunt you will slow down even more. The stunt mode is quite fun though especially in 4-player, watching someone screw up in a replay can cause a lot of laughter followed by violence.

Overall
Andy Robinson: I had more fun out of Waverace: Blue Storm than any other launch title. It is a very solid game and has a lot of options and modes to keep you busy. It's still just a racing game though, so don't expect to find yourself playing it in the early hours of the morning.

Review written by Andy Robinson

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