Tubular: Wave hello to Surf World Series
If I say it's safe to surf this beach...
You either surf, or you fight. And while there's plenty of the latter in this multicoloured monster of an industry, there's less of the former. The noble sport of surfing has been underrepresented by games, say developers Climax Studios, of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories fame. So they've decided to make Surf World Series [official site], an "arcade-style" wave-rider with five of the world's best surfing destinations, such as Hawaii and Portugal. You can come and look at a trailer, if you like flickering edits and sloshy, salty water.
There'll be 45 singleplayer challenges and three modes of 16-person mutliplayer, all allowing you to rank up and customise your character, say the devs. It's coming out at some as-yet-unknown point in 2017. I'm not sure how far the "arcade" element is going to go - I can spot no sharks or silliness - and some of those surfer dude animations look less gnarly and more gnarled. But the developers have a point about the under-representation of the sport. This year delivered the disappointing Steep to slake our extreme winter sports thirst but the only surf 'em up of 2016 that I can think of is the free and undersung multiplayer arcade slicer Surf Shogun.
My own interest in surfing extends only as far as the madness of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. But it's interesting to read that the recurring surf legend Kelly Slater has won more world championships than any other sportsperson, even beating professional drug-taker Lance Armstrong. He was both the youngest to win the World Surf League Championship at twenty and the oldest to win, at 39. What.