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Sunny Garcia's Surfing Review - PS2

Although this game has aged alongside the PS2, it still brings a good surfing experience to the average gamer. Surfing is a renowned extreme sport that takes a fair bit of talent to become good at, however the learning curve on Sunny Garcia's Surfing allows any gamer to quickly become a master of the waves. Join Sunny Garcia, Corey Lopez, and a handful of other famous surfers, as well as unlockable characters of course, through several different beaches with different wave styles in Sunny Garcia's Surfing as you show Krome studios just who the real grommet is.

Gameplay

Sunny Garcia's Surfing has a very similar control system to Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer. Transworld Surf still stands out as being the most realistic surfing game this generation, but Sunny Garcia's remains somewhere in between. The controls are very easy to pick up, and in no time at all you'll be pulling off floaters, cuts, and all sorts of unique moves. Trying to build up a decent amount of time in a barrel can get a bit hard thanks to the camera angles, but at least it leaves a little bit of room for skill. If you've never played a surfing game before, they follow quite similar to the Tony Hawk games, only on a wave.

Unlike Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer, the grind button in Sunny Garcia's Surfing does a taunt instead. Your surfer lifts his hands up towards the shore as if to celebrate the fact that he's on a wave. There's not much point to it, but at least he's not grinding a wave. Other buttons allow you to get some air, slow down, hold on to the board to pick up some speed, and of course cut back quickly to get away from that breaking wave. When you're not standing up on the board there's basically three things you can do: wait for a wave then press X to jump on, wait for a wave then press Square to dive under, or press Triangle and sit up on your board. All up, it creates a fairly realistic feel while you're not riding a wave, but getting up on to a wave is far too simple for a real surfer's liking.

There are several different modes in Sunny Garcia's Surfing ranging from Challenge, Free Ride, Championship, Time Attack, Arcade, and thankfully Multiplayer mode. The multiplayer mode isn't incredibly deep (no pun intended) but it does provide a little bit of extra fun to be had with friends. Free Ride allows you to get used to the system and the different types of waves, Challenge mode allows you to accept challenges from other surfers in order to unlock different things, and the other modes are fairly self explanatory. Championship mode is where you will spend most of your time if you want to beat the game, however the Free Ride mode offers a ... (continued next page)