Surfing H3O - PS2 (2000)

If I had spent $50 on this I'd have felt ripped off. This was a launch title for the PS2 in North America, released Oct 26 2000. Though hyped as a complete virtual beach experience, the reality is a sluggish, plodding mini-game. Hopeless Records provides a great soundtrack, with Samiam - Bird Bath; Digger - Pieces, Boy Toy Days; all played within the first 7 minutes of gameplay. The music is perhaps the best aspect of the game, appropriately fitting for sulf culture in the year 2000, and does well to immerse the player in the feeling of that era. Sadly, the clumsy gameplay and lack of goals make this title easily forgettable. I'd feel awful for anyone who got a PS2 on launch day and this was the only game they got with it. At the very least they might come out of it with an appreciation for the music of Hopeless Records, and may support their many artists: hopelessrecord...
Edit: Due to request from Hopeless Records, all audio from their catalog has been removed from this video. Stripped of it's fine soundtrack, Surfing H3O clearly becomes the worst PS2 game of all time.

[@d.fortner6653]

Surfing in a gta game would be cool it could be one of the side activities in grand theft auto 6 the next game in the series.

[@goatmansasquatch1485]

Just go surf

[@chrisgarcia687]

rockstar has a whole team working on the water physics as we speak.. guesss u got what u wanted

[@g4brielxo]

@@chrisgarcia687 lmao

[@keithjbs]

man, you might be right

[@Fowndfootage]

Someone cooked here

[@goatmansasquatch1485]

“Kelly Sunset” “Rob Makaha” the marketing guy was a genius. Man. I’m off to make a “Tony Eagles Pro Skater” game and make hella money

[@izusblur]

An ode to Surfing H30 if they bring surfing to GTA 6!

[@Takimeko]

I bought this game sometime last year on a whim purely because I was fascinated that this was published by Rockstar, of all companies. And because I wasn't aware that other surfing games existed aside from Kelly Slater's Pro Surfer. For some reason, this game did not want to cooperate with my HDMI setup whatsoever past the main menu, so I had to play it with my AV cables. Not sure if that's just a programming quirk or what, since no other game in my PS2 collection has that issue. Once I got into the actual game, I lowkey stopped playing about a minute in specifically to go look up the soundtrack, and I have not touched this game since. I just remember it being really drab and forgettable.

[@stuckintheinbetween]

I have some PS2 games like that. I haven't played this one in probably close to 20 years so I wouldn't know, however the way I played other games giving me issues like that was to use OPL's GSM 1080i setting. This requires FreeMcBoot, though.