I absolutely cannot understand the criteria for winning a race. You really don’t know if you’ve won until you finish and either hear the triumph music or 60s era “suck” theme. There is no race progress meter, so not only do you rarely see your fine-feathered opponents, but you have no idea where you rank in the race. I’ve progressed to other races when I haven’t completed any of the objectives but seemed to finish first. I’ve also won the race when someone obviously finished before me. I even looked in the manual, and there is no mention on what it takes to win a race.
The music is also unbelievably bad… except for one song which is rather catchy (“Something’s Going On”). All of the songs appear to be by the same band, which sound an awful lot like Blink 182, but like all the stuff that didn’t make the cut on a 182 album. Some of the music even sounds like 60s-era surfer rock.
The game tries to have a story, where a walrus correspondent for “SPEN” tries to insert meaning behind the race, and pretty much is a waste of time.
Pretty much all of the unlockables are pointless. You can unlock extra characters, surfboards, and music tracks (yay, more 60s surfer music). Although each character and surfboard have different attributes (like turning, stoke, speed, etc), there really is no distinguishable difference. A different character will pull off different moves, but that’s about it. You can unlock scenes from the movie, but so what?
