GAME CLEAR No. 274 -- Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage
video games game clear sanritsu denki ljn nes nintendoTown & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage (1988, NES)
Developer: Sanritsu Denki
Publisher: LJN Toys
Clear Version: NES
Clear Platform: NES
Clear Date: 1/24/26
| Why should I care? |
|---|
| To call this game forgettable would be unfair by virtue of its maddening surfing alone. The skateboarding half ain’t too bad, though. |
Catch the wave
It warms my little heart to be able to write this GAME CLEAR post. Alongside the Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt combo cart, this game was my first game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The two loose cartridges were packed in with the system as it was sold to me for $50 by Game X Change on Hamilton Place Boulevard in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I picked it out for my tenth birthday. The system and its games were among the first acquisitions of my then-burgeoning, lifelong interest in vintage games and hardware. That store is gone. The man who bought that gift for me is gone. I haven’t lived in Chattanooga in 15 years. The NES, Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and indeed Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage have followed me through all of those changes, having been dutifully packed in one moving box after another. After a recent trip to Hawaii, I finally learned to surf and managed to get through all Wood & Water Rage had to offer. Its no essential NES classic, but its primitive interpretations of boardsports offer a decent dose of arcade-style enjoyment once mastered, and I didn’t hate the shot of nostalgia.
As you’ve perhaps begun to suspect from the above long-winded opening paragraph, this post will be a bit navel-gazey and self-indulgent. Perhaps very much so. Your reading my reflections is appreciated but not expected.
I’ll start by clarifying what I meant by “learned to surf.” I did not literally do this in Hawaii (although I would love to someday). There simply was not time among the other things I wanted to do. Hawaii is utterly bursting with natural beauty, culture, and character. It is among my favorite places I’ve ever been. There is a conversation to be had about the islands and their relationship with American imperialism (I left them far more informed about that subject than I arrived, thanks to the wonderful Bishop Museum) and indeed the very ethics of mainland American tourism to Hawaii. Certainly I made an effort to be a conscientious and respectful visitor, but some may argue I shouldn’t have been there at all. That’s not a subject I plan to contend with in this post, but it’s doubtless something I’m interested in learning more about.
In any case, what actually happened is that after returning home, I went down a little shopping rabbit hole. Prior to my trip, I’d had an interest in visiting both Matsumoto Shave Ice and 88 Tees, two real small businesses located in O’ahu that appear in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and that did real-world merch collabs. Neither ended up being convenient for me, as I spent just one day in Honolulu and prioritized other things. 88 Tees has an online store, though, so I figured I could offer them my patronage remotely and retroactively. When browsing their website, I stumbled upon merchandise featuring the “Thrilla Krew”, which blasted my brain a couple decades back to my days with Wood & Water Rage. This Krew, as it happens, are the mascots and playable characters of said game. The associated merchandise became my obvious purchasing interest, but it also inspired me to dig a little deeper.
What I gathered is that these characters, also known as “Da’ Boys” were mascots commonly used on apparel produced by the real company Town & Country Surf Designs. I’ve further gathered that these shirts were quite popular among young boys (Hawaiian and mainlander alike) back in the 80s. Despite frequently appearing on T&C merch, Da’ Boys were evidently owned by creator Steve Nazar. Supposedly, a falling out between the two parties resulted in the collaboration ending. Thus, you now see shirts featuring these characters sold by companies like 88 Tees (possibly among others?) despite T&C Surf Designs remaining a going concern. Please note that I gleaned basically all of these bits of information from reddit posts from subreddits like r/Xennials and r/80s, so do take this stuff with a grain of salt. My curiosity was reasonably well satisfied, though. I finally knew a hell of a lot more about those guys from that mediocre boardsports game that came with my NES.
Anyway, as someone not immune to nostalgia, I bought my shirt, but there was one small problem. It was a bullshit shirt.
Learning to surf
I couldn’t go around wearing this shirt because it’s true. I don’t surf. I’ve never surfed. I can only name one album about surfing. The thing about Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage is that its surfing is actually notoriously inscrutable. As its name implies, the game consists of skateboarding and surfing. The skateboarding portion is easy enough to pick up, but the surfing makes no sense. I’m sure I never finished a single stage of it. I sort of wrote it off as broken as a kid, which limited the time I spent with this game. A lot of NES games were kind of ass, y’know? The Angry Video Game Nerd even has perhaps his most significant beef with the publisher of this title, LJN. It was probably just bad.
I think I was half right. The thing about NES games is in-game tutorials were often not really a thing back then. They expected you to open and read the included manual to understand the game. I didn’t have that manual, and online resources for such things were far less robust back then (and I was less savvy with them), so I was basically fucked. Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt are well-designed games whose controls are quite intuitive (indeed, much has been written about the brilliant subliminal instructional design of the first stage of the former), so I managed just fine with them. After a bit of messing around with Wood & Water Rage, I eventually just assumed it was a middling game thrown in with my NES to clear inventory unlikely to sell on its own while making it look like I was getting three whole games with my purchase.
When the Hawaii travel domino effect renewed my interest in the game I’d neglected since boyhood, I pulled it off the shelf and fired up the old NES. I immediately remembered its catchy “E1M1”-sounding main (and only) musical theme. The surfing still made no god damn sense.
Now, though, there are resources aplenty. The amusing consensus from the let’s plays and longplays and articles I’ve read about this game is that the description of the mechanics in the manual is actually useless! So that wouldn’t have helped. Indeed, I found multiple contradictory explanations for how to surf, all from people who claimed to have mastered it!
Using a sort of combination of those, I was finally able to finish the first stage. Indeed, I could probably keep playing through them forever. The eponymous Wood & Water Rage mode isn’t really beatable per se. It alternates between skateboarding and surfing stage-by-stage until it eventually reaches a point where the same stage loops indefinitely in each. I managed that, and I’ll call that beaten.
The object of the skateboarding stages is simply to reach the end of a side-scrolling course without crashing too many times or running out of time. You can ollie, grind, or jump in the air off your board to dodge the various obstacles, including baseballs, frisbees, RC cars, and bottomless pits. It’s actually pretty engaging by the end, and I enjoyed playing it until failure. The controls are responsive, the courses are tricky but navigable, and the bails never feel cheap. A good combo. Still, the mode is challenging enough to do you in eventually.
Surfing, on the other hand, is actually simpler once you know what you’re doing. All you gotta do is reach the end of a big ass wave without exhausting your life bar by falling off your board too much. Various marine life will try to cause you trouble, but frankly nothing is harder to contend with than the controls.
You may have noticed by now that I haven’t mentioned how to surf despite now claiming mastery. Well, that’s because it’s awfully hard to explain in text without sounding like Jon Bois’s NFL Overtime Rules. Basically, you kinda gotta rock the d-pad up and down and to the right until you can get to a position where you can reach the crest of the wave without entering the left (barrel) of it. Doing so puts you in the best position to then ride as far to the right of the wave as possible while slowly descending. Once you’re close to the bottom of the wave, you begin the process anew. It’s a feel thing as much as anything. Hell, maybe it’s an accurate interpretation of what balancing on a surfboard feels like. It’s strange to say, but it’s actually kinda fun once you get it down!
That’s not to say this game is anything to special. It is very limited in scope, and even its peers at the time like 720° and California Games offered better boardsports simulations at the time. Still, it was so fun to revisit. It’s sort of the joy of collecting and maintaining a collection of games and the way that necessarily captures some of the fingerprint of one’s life. After years and years and years of merely being displayed on my shelf but unfinished, this little gaming footnote finally got its day in the sun. Circumstances can arise that make such things happen. It offered me memories of my youth, of my dad, and to a certain extent all the intervening time. Life is at once long and short. The ways many parts of it seem to happen at the same time are a true pleasure to experience.