094 · TOWN & COUNTRY SURF DESIGNS: WOOD AND WATER RAGE

• Back of the Box
• Manual
• Introductions
• Do you know anything about T&C Surf Designs?
  • Those are their mascots
  • Da Boys likely has to do with the explosion of kids cartoon animation coming back to the forefront.
• Tales from the Manual
  • Very foreign words in the introduction for me.
  • Joe Cool. I thought that was Snoopy
• Gameplay
  • Beautiful waves as soon as the game boots
  • Skate Session
    • The graphics are nice, but does this feel like a ghost town?
    • Anything can hit you. The lack of Z-axis communication
      • And you can collect coins you’re not near by jumping
    • Why these enemies? A toy car? How often would that really show up?
    • Why does the ramp guarantee you’ll make the jump?
    • The lack of a goal. Where is the motivation?
    • Life Point System
      • You earn life points periodically as long a s you skate quickly, and you lose some if you crash. Depending on how you crash you either lose two or three life points. If you max out at eight life points the timer freezes, so skating perfectly means you cannot run out of time.
  • Big Wave Encounter
    • Nothing really works and it wouldn’t matter if it did.
    • Do a bunch of tricks before you’re ready to just call it in.
    • What’s the point?
  • Shouldn’t there be more branding?
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • Town and country II: Thrilla’s Surfari
    • Action platformer
    • 1992
• EGL

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 Town and country surf designs. What in water rage? Okay dudes, the time has come to really get radical. You and the rest of DABOYS, TNC's famous group of skate and surf crazies can kick out and pull off some awesome maneuvers together.

00:33 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Joe. And I'm Sean. And I'm Sam. Sean, you seem to get a little radical in this episode. I'm so cowabunga, bro. Yeah, that is tubular, my man. My man. Wow, this is your element.

00:55 Sean lived on a beach. He was abandoned by his first family and... Beaches of Lake Erie. Yeah, the beaches of Lake Erie. I wondered about that actually since you guys are, most of you are from Buffalo.

01:08 Most of us, yes. You don't have beaches, right? There are beaches, yeah. There are beaches. They're not like... Oh, he's committing. You know, oceanic beaches. Yeah, so nothing like, I guess, like Long Island has or, you know, as you go like along the rest of the East Coast. I mean, they're definitely beaches. They're just not very wavy beaches. I guess I just thought of them more like bays or lakes.

01:32 I mean, the lakes are too big for them to be like any kind of regular lake. But there's sand and stuff. There's sand. Yeah, and even like Lake Erie can have some, like, some... Not like, you're not going to surf. Yeah, I'm not going to surf on them. It's going to be wavy, you know. Well, Joe, I'm glad you're talking about surfing because today we're talking about Town & Country Surf Designs, a game where you... Wood and Water Rage. Yeah, Wood and Water Rage. You have to say the full name. I'm sorry.

01:55 Legally, you must say the full name. In fact, actually, that's a point of debate because Town & Country Wood and Water Rage is what this game is often abbreviated to. People don't care for the surf designs part. The reason we mention it is because that's the actual name of the company that basically paid LJN to make this game. They were like, hey, video games are hot and we're a company. Company. A company. Make us a video game that naturally would fit the theme of skateboarding and surfing. So, first off, do you guys know anything about Town & Country Surf Designs? I have never heard of them. No. Me neither. Okay. I really don't know anything about them at all.

02:32 And I think it's weird that this is our first, like, branded company NES game. You know? Wouldn't you think a McDonald's game would come out first or something? Yeah, that's what I first thought was, like, this is like those Burger King games from the mid-2000s. Yeah, I was thinking that. Like King Sneak or whatever it was. Sneak King. You know? Like, the easier one. The one that sounds like something. King Sneak would be a good game. Oh, it sounds like Sneaking.

02:58 Yeah. There were three of those Burger King games. Never got any of them. They, uh, they, well, there's a guy who's collecting, like, every copy of Sneak King. And I know I've made this joke before, but no, no, that was the Shaq Fu guy. So, um, I make this connection all the time. I just think it's interesting that there are people out there devoting their Saturdays and Sundays to garage sale hunting to find copies of these games.

03:20 And they're, like, and they're capital investment. Like, they're actually spending all this money on them, too. Yeah, but it's not getting returned to the government. So that's bad. Anyway, uh, just the only thing I could figure out was when I was looking up town and country surf designs is that these duh boys. The boys. That we keep hearing them out, and they're in the game, and they're referred to as duh boys, whether it's the manual. Yeah, they sound pretty chill. Yeah, they're the company's mascots. All of them. Not just one. All of them. I thought there were two of them that were. No, there's four. There's Cool Joe. Interesting. Thrilla Gorilla.

03:57 Two others that I don't remember. The cat that's in the tux. That one's my favorite. Well, we can definitely talk about those guys when we get to the manual section. But, like, also, isn't this just bizarre? Like, a bunch of mascots you never even heard of. I really thought that we wouldn't run into something like this until, like, 89, 90. This is some really weird territory. Yeah, the whole thing right out of the gate is, from the moment you read the title, you're like, this is weird. Yeah. The title sounds like the beginning of a poem. Like, town and country surf design, wood and water rage.

04:33 Yeah, that's okay. Oh, yeah. That should have been the manual. You should have wrote the manual. Right. Speaking of the manual, if we'll just get into that, there are some, like, super foreign words right off the bat for me in the introduction of this thing where it's like, you know, okay, dudes, the time has come to really get radical. You and the rest of da boys, TNC's famous group of skate and surf crazies, can kick out and pull off some awesome maneuvers together, whether you're jamming the ramps, jumping the cracks, riding the rails, or just laying back tall.

05:14 Like, it's like, I love that they lean into this, like, this must be lingo that, like, I'm not aware of. Do you know anything about this? You, you like skateboarding a little bit, right, Sam? A little bit, yeah. Laying back tall is, it's just, you know. Laying back tall sounds like a surfing term, though.

05:28 It's like hang 10. Is that, is that, I don't know if anyone thinks. I thought hang 10 was surfing. But do you jam to ramps? Yeah, hang 10 is surfing. But laying back tall sounds surfing also. Well, I don't know why. They're saying that that's all skateboarding stuff. That's skateboarding? Oh, okay. I thought it was like, you know how, hang 10 means that you hang all 10 of your toes off the surfboard. Yeah. Yeah, from the front. And then lay back tall means like, you go into a prone position.

05:51 Uh. I don't think so. No. And also just to, just to add, here's some of their surf vocabulary for you. You'll be face to face with some of the most explosive swells around. Execute some low, hard bottom turns, flawless spin outs, or just skate the lip in order to rack up some serious points. Skate the lip sounds more skating then. Skate the lip? That's what I thought. Yeah, but like, you can't, can you skate the lip in this? Can you skate the lip in the surf? I assume it is the lip the, the point where it, where it, where the wave breaks? Yeah. That's what you're encouraged to do. Yeah. Encourage is very difficult.

06:29 I mean, can I, or can a player? Can you like skate it? You can surf it, but can you skate? Yeah, that's tough. And just going through the, the mascot names for a second, we already covered the best one, Thrilla Gorilla. Uh, that's fantastic. He is my favorite, yeah. Uh, then we have uninspired stuff like Tiki Man. And then we have like, I don't know, like a copyright lawsuit in Joe Cool. Like, isn't that Snoopy? Oh, I thought Joe Cool was like the, the camel mask guy. Yeah, I'm just gonna say, isn't that like a cigarette thing? I thought Joe Cool was Snoopy. Maybe they're all the same guy. We were all wrong and Joe Cool is this guy. I thought Joe Camel is the camel.

07:13 Oh yeah, right. We had no town and country at all. Or serve, or... Just so, just so you know, when you type in lay back tall, you get pictures of chairs. Nice. And we should note that chairs are not a playable character in this game. Not in this one at least. Despite how that might have enhanced it. Despite the demand. Maybe it's DLC. Alright, so who out of the three of you thinks you can give me an overview of what you do in town and country, surf designs, wood and water rage? Alright, I'll take it.

07:45 So, basically you have two modes and they're pretty straightforward. The first mode is skateboarding. You are just trying to get to the end of the round while racking up as much, as many points as you possibly can by jumping over obstacles, etc. Second round is surfing. And I think your initial goal in this is to just understand what the heck you're doing and how to play this game. And then it becomes clear that you're trying to rack up points by doing things by, I guess, skating the lip.

08:09 And surfing within the break of the wave for as long as you can, avoiding obstacles and safely getting to shore. I think that's fair. I would also add that in both of those there's a time limit to, like, you know, you must complete the stage in 30 seconds or I think it's 60 seconds. No time limit in surfing, but yeah, definitely in skating. There was, I thought there would have been a time limit in surfing. You just, you sort of have to survive it. Well, okay, because I thought you can surf over to the beach whenever you please. Yeah, you can finish it pretty quickly. Okay, got it. So the time limit in that one is just more like, hey, no more points. Yeah. Like, chill it with the points. Yeah. Okay.

08:48 And the skateboarding one with the timer on that one, every time you complete it, you go a little further back in the level. So you're actually playing the level, it's almost like in Super Mario Brothers, you would get the, just the flagpole part at first. And then you jump to the flagpole and then it would be like, oh, here's a little more of the level that came before that. And then you'd play the parts that you were familiar with. It's very strange. It's just very lazy.

09:10 Yeah. I think a better analogy for that, actually, if that wasn't clear, is that imagine if you did a 10 meter dash and then after successfully completing that, you do a 20 meter dash, but with the other 10 meters that you already did at the end of it. Yeah, you have to start back. Yeah. Right. You just start 10 meters further each time. So with that in mind, let's just, let's just jump right into it. Let's talk about this game.

09:33 I love the intro to this game. Oh, yeah. That nice, like, soft wave breeze and everything. It's funny because that sound, it's just a static sound. Yeah, just white noise. All intents and purposes, like, that should annoy me. No, it's very nice. But just because I know it's like, it's trying to be waves. It's relaxing. It was nice, but the first red flag for me came up in the title screen where there's just a yin yang. Like, I was just kind of chilling there. Their logo. Their logo is the yin yang. The town and country sort of designs it. It's specifically in those colors.

10:04 Black and white? Was it black and white in the game? I thought it was like orange and purple or something. Yeah, it's usually like blue and purple, I think, is their official colors. Yeah, and there's like a checkerboard on the purple part. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Well, they're not really selling you on their brand, I guess.

10:22 The yin yang, sum out. Yeah. I'm totally against the idea of good and evil. Well, just seeing like a symbol just kind of floating on the main page with... That didn't seem to have anything to do with what we were about to play. Yeah, that has nothing to do with anything. It just seems like kind of, you know, a red flag to me. And what's worse is like town and country surf designs are still around. So they have like not done any more brand awareness since this NES game. I think they're based in Hawaii. They're like a Ron John. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, fine. But in Hawaii. Right, exactly.

10:57 Okay, so let's just, let's talk about the skateboarding section of this. As we mentioned, you have to skate through the level and there's like obstacles along the way that try to like knock you over. You're capable of jumping with your skateboard or without it. Yeah. You know, I don't know. Like it seems like... What's the purpose of that? I really like the like pre Tony Hawk skateboarding media.

11:25 Yeah. Because it has like this really weird idea of what skateboarding is. And like, it's sort of like in... I forgot what exactly there, but I think a lot of made for TV shows and movies had skating scenes where they're not really doing tricks so much as just staying upright. It's a vehicle for them almost. It's like this is how we get around. And that's just what this game is doing with skateboarding. You're just on your way to surf.

11:50 Yeah. And so like, you know, these obstacles come throughout the stage, but they, there's really like no rhyme or reason to these enemies. There's like a toy car. Yeah. A turtle.

12:04 And you can jump on the turtle for points. Yeah. It's messed up. Yeah. I think that we're thinking about this the wrong way. They're not enemies. Like this is supposed to be a simulation. It's just obstacles.

12:13 Maybe they're not like, maybe there's no cars because there's like holes all over the sidewalk too. You have like, you know, the caution barriers and you have the holes you have to jump over. And so that's why there's a difference between jumping with your skateboard and without it, because if it's a barrier, you can do this cool trick where you jump with just you and then land back on your skateboard. But if there's a hole, you'll jump without the skateboard and the skateboard will just fall into the hole and you'll just collapse. Right. Because you can't stand up without your skateboard.

12:42 Absolutely. Yeah. That was an interesting thing. I thought it was, I thought it was like, okay, it's interesting that they gave you the option to jump without your skateboard. So your skateboard can slide through while you go over something. But there's only one obstacle in the game that needs that. And they just put it everywhere. So you'd have to use it a lot. And I feel like that was a little happy.

13:00 You could just, yeah, you could also just jump over it too. Like I thought it was annoying also that the regular just Ollie, you know, is you have to hit back and a for it to happen at the same time, which I don't know, just make it be, you know, why not? I thought that was annoying at first too, until I started like kind of getting the feel for it. It sort of feels good to control that. Not only that, but it's the only source of challenge in this mode of the game. Yeah. In fact, you know, the graphics are pretty nice in this game overall.

13:32 And I'm not being funny when I say that. I do think that there's like a level of detail here that they, that they put in that other games didn't have. But am I wrong in thinking that this whole mode, the skateboarding one, we were talking about the enemies, but it kind of feels like a ghost town. Yeah. Like nothing's really happening. It's one enemy at a time other than like the obstacles. They're obstacles. Right. But like, I don't know. It just doesn't really seem like, it seems like with all these beautiful graphics and like everything in the background, nothing's really going on.

14:02 I think that you could say that about a lot of things. Like any game that has, yeah. I mean, what's going on in Mario aside from you running? Well, they were all turned into bricks and blocks and things. So there's, it's explained. I don't know. I think I'm going to stick with this one because I think it's worth noting that this is the first game that I felt like, huh, it's a bit of a ghost town in here. What's that? What's happening? Maybe it's because I don't think I felt that in other games. Maybe it's because it's one of the few games that has been trying to emulate a real place,

14:31 like a street. Right. It could, it could be a mix of that. I think it also has to do with the, the scrolling pace of the skateboarding. Like as you're going by, it doesn't scroll by like relatively fast. There's a button to like increase your speed. I never really thought like, I was like, well, I'm getting out of control here. I'm going to slow down. You can like increase your speed up to like a little bit faster than you were going. Like an extra mile per hour. Yeah. You don't get that fast. But if you, if you don't increase your speed or if you stop doing it for too long, you get really slow. I think you might even come to a, you come to a stop. I don't know. You don't come to a stop, but you get like annoyingly slow.

15:06 And I think that adds this whole ghost town feel that I'm getting from the whole game. But I think the more important thing is, is that everything in this skateboarding mode just felt a little too like simple and easy. So I don't want to oversell the idea of like, yeah, the enemies are strange, like with the toy cars and stuff like that. But sorry, the obstacles and the holes all over the place is like, why would a kid be skating here? Because they're rad.

15:31 Yeah. But I'm saying like, I don't know. It's the, there's not, that stuff doesn't happen like all at once. There's no like sweet spot moment where it's like, oh yeah, you got a perfectly time to jump to get over the car and then, you know, move to the left to avoid the thing. You have plenty of time to take care of everything.

15:47 And there's a lot of, and I know that the fun comes from trying to get points, but there are a lot of times where there are obstacles and I'm like, that looks tough. Let's go around it. Like it's really easy to just like avoid things. Like there's not really much that like forces you to, to do things a certain way.

16:05 Yeah. There's a complete lack of goal in this mode as well. Like I'm not sure what the motivation is, unless scoring points is the thing, but it felt like you should be skating to something, not just a checkered flag at the end, especially when you're just going to go a little bit further back each time. Yeah. There's no like, you know, there's no prize at the end. Yeah. I feel like the goal is supposed to be like, how many, how many points can you rack up?

16:31 Can you do better for your friends? Can you do better than your friends? But it, it falls short because you're not doing like crazy tricks or anything that like seems fun to rack up points. You're just jumping on turtles. Yeah. And you have, you have the, the ramp, which is a, which is a great idea to maybe like a moment to do a trick or something. We saw that with the hot dog jumps.

16:50 The fact that you can jump with your skateboard is enough trick for this game. Sure. Uh, I think it's weird though, that the ramp guarantees you the jump. Yeah. Like as soon as you jump over the ramp, it's like, Oh, don't worry about the rest. We'll make sure that you auto complete. Like how about like, if you didn't come in with enough force on the ramp, you just fall in the hole. Right. Yeah. Why should it, why should it automatically like fling you into the air on the topic of tricks? I don't know if that many tricks on skateboards were invented.

17:16 Well, that's not true, but I also, I mean, yeah, but even so, I think what I meant by that is this game knows like the programmers of this game knew so little about tricks that just jumping with the, with the board was enough for them. And I think that I agree with you that there were definitely tricks around at that time. Nobody was doing a 900. We know that, but like there were definitely tricks, but also like this is a video game. You can do whatever you want.

17:44 They could have like, when you're up in the air, just throw the skateboard up, catch it on the way down. Like you could have done anything you wanted to do because you're not tied to any real life consequences. And I know we can't like expect them to program crazy, crazy tricks into it, but I just think that it's, it's not as satisfying to be the point rack up thing and not have enough going on to give you those points. But why can't we expect crazy things in this game when you're playing as a gorilla?

18:09 No, but I mean like you can't expect 3d skateboarding game style tricks. Absolutely. the world to figure it out, you know? And I looked it up. Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip in like the early eighties. It says, okay. So we could have had it. We could have had it. Yeah.

18:30 Uh, I did have one other point on this. Um, there's like, there's coins and stuff littered throughout the stage that don't mean anything to us cause we don't care about scores. Uh, I was just concerned about finishing the level and that turned out not to be a hard thing to do at all. Uh, the coins though, there's like a, there's an inherent problem here with the Z axis that they're trying to convey where like if you're at the lower half of the screen and you jump, but the coin was clearly like placed at street level.

19:02 If you move up enough in your vertical jump, it'll count the coin. I wonder that I was trying to test it and figure it out. I could not for the life of me figure out if that was what was happening. Yeah. It's like a, like a shortcut there. Right. It seems like they were just like, well, the hitbox of the character has turned, has touched the, but then why wouldn't that happen with pitfalls? I mean, cause they, they already have established that your way of tracking your Z axis is looking at the shadow. So they, they know how to do that.

19:31 Yeah. And the shadow, the shadow is great. Like, uh, you know, a lot of games that don't have a shadow, it's just, it never works out because you need that as like a placement thing, especially in like later 3d games. I always, it's my first piece of advice for people who are new to video games and play 3d ones when they jump, they're like, how, where, where am I going? I was like, well, you gotta look at your shadow. You know, like, like, like in real life, you just shadow when you jump. Uh, but if you look at your shadow, I think that, and, um, uh, moving a camera are like the two obstacles of like people not playing video games these days and skateboarding.

20:08 I do want to mention before we, I assume we'll move on from the surfing area to the surfing soon. But before we do, I do want to just like, I'd feel bad if I didn't mention the fact that I, I, I respect the, what they were trying to do by making the controls.

20:21 I feel like missed a little bit, but they were doing something more interesting than just the basics. I, I like that you have to hold back an A to jump because it feels like you're, you're like you're, you're, you're leaning back to grab the board, you know, like to, to pull your feet up and grab the board to like keep it with you or something like, and even the idea of like using, using the B button to speed yourself up by pumping your foot or whatever it is you're doing that gave it like, made me feel like it was a little more technical. Like I was doing something a little more.

20:54 Yes. Not a skateboarder. Yeah. And there's definitely, there's some praise to be given to, to, to choosing this even as the skate motor. I don't know about you guys, but I felt like this was unexpected for a skate motor. I wasn't expecting like to rush through a course over and over and over again. Uh, if you get a look at the manual or the back of the box, you see the surfing one and

21:14 it's very laid out of just like, you're just riding this wave, score as many points as you can. I kind of expected the skate one just to be like, you're in a half pipe, you know, like uh, just like a re-skate of the wave. Yeah. Just keep going back and forth doing different tricks and how many points can you rack up in 30 seconds? I would have expected something like that. So it's an interesting choice.

21:33 I just think that there's a lot of flaws in the design here. Uh, I think it could be cool if they took this. This idea of like a skateboard platformer and you know, that was just the whole game. I think that, you know, that idea has a lot of potential. You, you know, this game, I don't know the title of it off the top of my head, but what's that game with the motorcycle, uh, started out on like PS3 trials, right? And yeah, that could have been cool. Like in a skateboard kind of world where you have to like grind on a rails and jump appropriately.

22:04 Like specifically set up levels, kind of that kind of deal. Yeah. Like that kind of thing. And I would have liked to see that variation happen even here where you just get the whole course from the start and then you go to a new place, you know? Yeah. That requires creation of content. Absolutely. Yeah. Which we're not getting from LJN.

22:22 That's true. Ever. This is, this game is bereft of content. Much like, yeah, much like previous games developed by them. But I mean, should we move on then? The only thing I have to mention the life point system because it's the only thing we haven't covered. If we're going to cover everything about skateboarding, let's at least talk about the life point system.

22:40 Uh, you earn life points, uh, throughout, like you start with four, but you're going to earn more as you skate quickly, uh, and avoid obstacles. Uh, if you crash, you'll lose some life points, but you'll just be able to like start again, you know, like right where you left off. So theoretically there is like a health bar in certain ways, but you lose a lot for crashing compared to what you get for skating.

23:05 Well, I did like a feature though, that if you max out your life points, the timer actually stops. So you don't even have to worry about the timer anymore. Are you worried though? You're not, you're never worried, but now I guess like if you're going for score, this is kind of your reward for playing so well. It's like, well, now you might as well pick up every coin. Yeah. And do every trick because you don't have to worry about the time. Make the game more boring. Yeah. Right. There's no time limit anymore. You're, you have nine lives.

23:36 I actually don't know how many lives it goes up to, but, uh, yeah, it goes up to eight. Okay, cool. I have it right here in the manual. Uh, yeah, I just thought that that was worth mentioning because it's, it's nice to see that they didn't just say like, well, if you fall, you die. And that's the game. Yeah.

24:29 And now we're going to talk about the big wave encounter, as they call it in the game. I think that that's neat. Better than surfing. Better than surf session, which I think they call the other one skate session. So big wave encounter. Sean, how do you do anything in this mode? That's a good question, Mike.

24:50 I have an idea of how you do it. But basically the controls that you're given, you have eight directions that you can move your monkey and or cat. I'm sorry, gorilla and or cat. Or person or tiki man. I think it's just the two. I think in this, oh, you know what? Yeah, you're right, because I'm thinking of the later mode where you combine them. Yes. So you have eight directions that you can move your surfboard. Only two of them really work. And then you have the ability to stand to lean forward or lean backward. And I think only one of those is really feasible.

25:36 Because I could not, for the life of me, really control my character in this game. I was able to finish a couple sessions from sheer luck, I think. And do a couple tricks. But this game has a, sorry, this session has a mechanic in which it's sort of always sucking you into the wave. I don't think that you can ever really overcome that power for very long before you end up reaching the pier.

26:38 You're not wrong. You have to do that for as much time and then they surf it into the beach to rack up all the points. I had a similar experience. And I usually write very detailed notes in a Google Doc of my feelings for like each mode and things I want to talk about. Now, my first bullet point here is just nothing really works. And it wouldn't matter if it did. I don't really think if this mode even worked. I'm trying to figure out what's the point.

27:06 What did we sign up for here? And this skate one at least had like a get to the end of the goal. This is the equivalent of just like ride a wave for a little bit. Do something, you know. I don't think that there's anything to this mode that makes me say like after I played it once. I got to get back in and figure out how to really do this. There's no reward. No. Yeah. When my goal at this point, once I started figuring out how hard this was and how I couldn't figure it out, like my goal was to just be able to just stay and not do anything. Like my goal was just be able to just stay in this spot of the wave and just like sustain that.

27:42 And it's not like I would have been excited if I was able to keep that balance. But then after a while I would have been like, wait a minute. This isn't fun. I'm just maintaining a balance in the right spot on this wave. For as long as I can. Well, the worst part about it actually is that at one point I started the session at the big wave encounter. And I'm going down and I'm just holding the right D-pad, you know, like just to just drift as much as possible.

28:10 And I just somehow, I don't know if it was the way I started or something. I just rode it right in to the beach. I didn't do a single trick. Like I just rode that wave all the way to the beach and saw the cut scene. And I said, that's really all I need out of this. And that's it. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Yeah. I guess it's worth noting for the people who would be interested in the big wave encounter that you can't really do like a trick per se. Like I didn't mean that they go up to the top of the thing and like get some air or anything like that. It counts as a trick if you get up there. Yeah. You're essentially just trying to like create turns. So like you can do like a 90 degree turn. You can do like a full 360. Doesn't this sound fun?

28:57 Yeah. You can. The other thing you can do is you can ride the pipeline. You can get tubular. Yes. You can hit a bird. In the tube. Birds are turtles. You don't want to hit the bird. You can. Also like those things in this mode. Unnecessary. Yeah. We didn't even talk about that. There's a guy who was in like one of those like. Yeah. What's he doing up there? He's just lounging there. He's going to float. Yeah. He's going to die. It's a tidal wave.

29:23 And he's pretty big. I don't think he can swim. But also riding the pipeline and tubular. Same thing. That's what I meant. No. I know. We're on the same page. I love that. You get 100 points for each half second that you're successfully in the pipeline. It just seems like a really intricate detail that could have been put somewhere else for creative effort. It seems like they knew that it sucks in there. Yeah. Right? It does suck in there. Yeah. You really have to be like a quarter inch into the pipeline. If you go any further in, you're going to just crash. So you really just have to do your thing. You get these bananas, though.

30:04 Which only makes sense if you're the gorilla. Right. You can be the cool cat and pick up bananas. I don't know. Viewers at home, listeners at home, have you guys ever fed your cat a banana? Let us know how it goes. Yeah. I don't think it would go that well. So this mode, I think, is a better example of them trying to do something creative with unique controls and failing way harder. If this is them trying to be creative, I don't want it. Exactly. But you can see that it's like, I want to encourage these developers of the past to continue trying to come up with interesting ways of controlling things, but not like this. Do better.

30:46 You know, because when I hear that, when I realize it's something like that, at first, I'm like, oh, this will be interesting. It's exciting to figure out. And then when it just fails flat on its face, there's maybe a point when you say, maybe we go for a more conventional control scheme. I mean, I know that if you're going to make this a surfing, like, if it's a control scheme that lends itself to surfing, you can't just do direct input. Like, right can't mean right, up can't mean up, because then you don't feel like you're surfing. You just feel like you're moving a sprite that has a surfboard on it.

31:20 But no, this, it's too abstract. This is, there are too many levels of going, of trying to decipher what that means. Um, you don't know what the force is working against you for the most part, at least in my opinion. So yeah, this is an imperfect attempt at this. So what did you guys think about the third mode, which is just a combination of mode one and two? Uh, it, I thought I had pretty much the same thoughts as I did about mode one. But alternating. And also the same thoughts as mode two. Well, it should be noted that Sam is saying that because there's absolutely nothing different. It's just that now you're getting like a combined score. Now it's back to back instead of having to click on it.

32:04 Exactly. Instead of just selecting the next game mode. And I can't help but feel like this third mode could have, could have been a moment for something different. You know, uh, this could have been like a, you know, we actually don't need this third mode. Maybe we put more time into modes one and two. We don't need the option for the player to just do both at the same time because that's not anything different.

32:29 Right. That's not a new mode. It almost feels like they wanted to have a third mode and they didn't have time to make one. So they're like, let's just make a third mode, both modes together. Do you guys know if the points are cumulative for the third mode? If it combines your skate and your surf points? Fairly certain it is. Yeah? Yeah. All right. Well, that's pretty cool. Pretty positive.

32:47 That's a bigger score. So guys, I think the benefit of, of this mode is it makes you enjoy the skateboarding more because you play the skateboarding and you're like, oh, this is okay. Then you go to the surfing and you're like, oh my God. And you go back to the skateboarding and you're like, oh my God, this is great compared to the surfing. Oh man. So I think that was their, that was their goal. That is assuming that you'll pick up the skateboarding again after the surfing. The surfing might just deject people from ever putting this cartridge just back in their NES. Video games in general, you might be done at that point. Well, I've seen it. I've seen the worst. I don't need to see any more.

33:20 Shouldn't there be more branding in this game? Yeah. It's really just the title in the, in the main menu. This is just one giant commercial for them. So why not just like, I guess the characters are branding though. But yeah. Maybe if they're on like t-shirts and stuff like that, but I didn't feel a connection to any of them. Because I'd never heard of the company. No, I'm just saying like, I wasn't playing as the real a gorilla and being like, I need to have a shirt with this guy on. I kind of want to throw a gorilla shirt. I got good news for you.

33:47 I got great news. But also, and this kind of counts as like a stray thought, I guess. Like you have a gorilla wearing, you know, bathing suit trunks. You have a cool cat who seemingly is like wearing a full tuxedo or suit or something. That's great. That's fantastic. Okay. This game for a thing that's called like town and country surf designs, wood and water rage. Let's really break that down for a second. Okay. What, what is the, like, what is the rage part of it? And like, I get that that's probably meaning like party, like, oh, it's going to be a rage, you know? Like, like we're throwing a rager. But like, for me, the only rage in this game is playing the game itself.

34:32 That's not good. Zane. I really think that, I just think that they could have went so much crazier with this game. You have a cat wearing a suit, but you're like, you know, make sure you give them bananas.

34:47 I had a thought about that too. Okay, good. About cool cat. And that's the, isn't, I mean, isn't it pretty nuts? Like nutso? Like bonkers? That it's a cat in a suit surfing. Because like one, cats don't like water. And two, if you're in a suit, you probably shouldn't be on water. But this is both. I know, that's insane. That's some rage right there. I was going to save it for the post show. But, and I, there's pictures of this. Because my dad grew up like on a beach essentially. And their cat surfed.

35:20 Exactly. Yeah, no, he surfed. There's pictures of him on the surfboard in the water. Why? Just because your dad. I can easily ask for the pictures. Just because your dad put his cat on a surfboard in the water didn't mean that the cat surfed. We don't have enough information anymore, Sean. We only have the pictures. Okay? So you have to make assumptions on that. He wasn't wearing a suit. Was he on a title wave? Only give him the show notes. Why not? Was he riding the pipeline? He wasn't riding. And there wasn't like a hurricane going on. So there weren't these gigantic waves happening to cause anything crazy to go on. I'll tell you another thing though.

35:59 Even if cats could surf or couldn't surf, that's not important. The problem is that we have a cat in this game that surfs but chooses not to do anything like out of this world.

36:12 80s pun intended. It's wearing a suit. Out of this world about it? Yeah, like there's nothing out of this world other than the fact that the cat is like standing on his hind legs. That is surfing. He's wearing a suit. Wearing a suit. Wearing a suit and collecting bananas and standing on his hind legs. I don't know. I think I'm demanding too much from this game, guys. But at the same time, like, I don't know. It's like, you know, you've got like half a product here. You've got half a product.

36:37 It seems like the kind of game that you would get after you buy one of this company's shirts or something. You're like, oh, yeah. And since you spent 50 bucks, here's this game. Or in like a cereal box or something. Yeah, I was going to say that I want to pull up a Sears catalog or like a Toys R Us pamphlet from this time and just see what this game was going for. Because like we've been saying, this is the least amount of content I've seen in a game since.

37:05 Karate Champ? Maybe Karate Champ, yeah. No, Karate Champ is leaps and bounds deeper than this game. Like a stack-up? Yeah. No, it's more like a stack-up. Yeah, more like, actually, you know, Winter Games even had more, even if those modes aren't functional. Even if you can only actually do like two things in Winter Games, at least they offered six. I'm amazed that we were actually giving praise to the actual skateboarding mode because I think that that is even less than the surfing mode. Interesting. I thought that the surfing was just pure trash. Oh, it's trash. But there was something to it. Well, I have good news for everybody.

37:46 It's time for the sequels and spinoffs section because you knew there had to be something, right? You just knew that we weren't done with town and country surf designs. Well, I got good news. They lost the surf designs part. They added two Roman numerals, the II.

38:05 Just two random ones. Two ones. They added a C. Two ones make a two. And they got rid of every other character in the game except for our boy, Thrilla Gorilla. And we are getting, in 1992, Town and Country 2, Thrilla's Safari.

38:26 Safari. But there's no surfing part. No, it's surfing, right? Wait. It's the surf-ari. Did you say there's surfing? Like a safari. I said surf-ari. But is there a safari there? Is there surfing in the game? I never said anything about the game yet. Oh, I thought you said, for some reason I thought you said there was no surfing in the game. Oh, I said they got rid of the surf designs part. They made the title just a little shorter for us.

38:48 Gotcha. So we get Town and Country 2, Thrilla's Safari, which is very weird because it turns the whole thing into an action platformer. Okay? So he's not surfing. He's not surfing. He's using a surfboard as a skateboard and doing the skateboard thing that we talked about here, but through multiple levels in a safari.

39:10 Okay. All right. That's something. Yeah. Thrilla Gorilla here on the box art looks a little bit like Funky Kong, if anybody knows who Funky Kong is. I know Funky. All right. And that comes out in 1992.

39:24 So... I think it's perfect timing. Yeah. Many improvements will have happened to the system at that point, so Town and Country is going to have to have a lot to live up to. We'll see if they do when we play it. However, right now we need to decide if Town and Country Surf Design's Wood and Water Rage is an essential game. It's time for the Essential Games List. Save us from this game or make it essential. Your choice. What do you pick? Or will this game save us?

39:57 This game is bad. All right. It's not good. The surf part is jank, and there's nothing in the skate part that's really interesting. It handles fine, but there's nothing interesting there. Surf part is jank folder for half of this game. Okay. Colors are cool. So it's not essential. Oh, yeah. Not essential. You heard it here first. Just to be clear. Bad game. Not good. That's straight from Sam's mouth. Sean, what's coming out of your mouth?

40:29 Town and Country is an essential Happy Meal toy. Like if this came... Like we said in the beginning, if this came out with something that... You know, you didn't ask for it, and you didn't pay for it, but you got it, it'd be pretty funny, like just to have it, but as a video game, it's not anything. So it's not essential. Thank you for that. Joe? Town and Country Surf Design's Wooden Water Rage is a very poor example of the 1980s age. Once you start, you'll soon decide it's time to disengage.

41:03 Wow. That's beautiful. I just wrote that right now. Let me explain what happened in an alternate universe. Town and Country Wooden Water Rage is actually like an early predecessor to SimCity, where you develop a town that becomes a country, and there are both like earthquakes and floods that happen in your civilization building that cause you, the main person controlling like the god of the game essentially, to rage a lot because you're working on building this town and these natural disasters are destroying it.

41:43 Instead, we got the version where you are playing a like half-baked commercial advertisement for a brand that most kids have probably never even heard of about a bunch of like Teenage Minute Ninja Turtle ripoff style characters who do absolutely nothing interesting in a game that would be more compelling to go outside and surf yourself.

42:13 Not essential. I'm going to include Sean's kiss in the podcast because a lot of people have been writing in asking, how does Sean kiss? And I said, I don't know if he wants to share that. So he just did. I'm more of a guy. Now you guys know. You're going to find out a lot of things if you ask us. A lot of people just come up to me all the time and email and they go, Mike, what's your social security number? And I just say, well, you know, it's funny because it's very close to yours. Just a couple digits off.

42:41 If that is somebody's social security number, I'm sorry, but you'll have to sue Sean, not Nostalgia. That's all the time we have for this episode. If you want to get in touch with Nostalgia, you just contact us on Twitter at Nostalgia Cast. We post every single weekday. We do this cool thing where we post things related to the episodes of the week. And sometimes I also just post like general musings. We have a pretty consistent fan base over there. People who talk to us on a daily basis and say, you guys don't know anything. Back in my day, this was fun.

43:15 And I say, OK, that's fair. Thank you for your submission. You know, that's what that's what we're looking for. We're looking for an honest dialogue. So if you liked Town and Country Wood and Water Rage, please post a picture of you with your copy that you surely kept because of how much you love it. And second, tell us what we got wrong about it. Because we like to hear that stuff. Also, tell us if you've ever played any other video game.

43:42 Or ever played like, you know, ball and stick outside. Like, you know, like. Or that ball and ring game from the colonial times. Yeah. We never really talk about like prerequisites to video gaming on this podcast. But you should probably play like Jax. And like, Yo-Yo. Oh, Yo-Yo. Or 52 card pickup. These are like things you should play before you ever touch a video game, you know. You gotta know what games are before you go into video games. Oh, Jax. I thought you meant like Jak and Daxter. Nah, nah. Jak and Daxter in most of those games. I'm gonna say it. They were good at the time. They're not worth anything anymore. Yeah, we haven't played them. I haven't in a long time. I've played Jak and Daxter too. But I feel like they were probably good.

44:22 Nah, I have a big thing. For me, PS1, N64. No, I know. You hate it. And you hate it irrationally. Ratchet and Clank? All the way. Okay. That's my deal. Let us know where you guys stand on hearing about PS2 games on our NostalgiaCast podcast. Never said. Never said that we were gonna do that, Mike. If you want them gone. Why do you keep telling me? We'll get rid of these other co-hosts. It's easy. They're replaceable. It's true. Alright, thank you. So much for listening. I'm Michael Zuzino. He has the keys. You can find me on atzuzofilm on Twitter. And I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.!