Gaming
Games
The best jet-ski games of all time
The only racing games that can make Burnout look boring.
Head into a shop that sells games and you can’t help but trip over a dozen car racing titles. Everyone loves them, they sell by the million. And who wouldn’t, when they look this life-like nowadays?
But what on earth happened to the jet ski racer? We want to know because, let’s be honest: sometimes jet skis are more fun than cars. Simple as. There may be no Wave Race U on the horizon for the Wii U yet, but we can still have a little trip down memory lane to check in with all the jet ski classics that have ditched plain old asphalt for unpredictable surf.
Jet Ski Championship (1989) Commodore 64
Ahh, the old days. When a water effect was flinging a few pixels out of the back of a jet ski sprite, not spending millions of computing man-hours rendering seagulls reflected in the surface of the Pacific. Jet Ski Championship was one of the very first mainstream jet ski games, released for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC way back in 89.
It’s a top-down racer where the whole track and your rivals fit into one screen. Yes, it’s rudimentary: it was delivered on a cassette tape after all. But, surprisingly enough, it’s still good fun. There is a controversial element to this minor Codemasters classic, though. The developer also released near-identical games featuring bikes instead of jet skis. But who wants to ride a bike when there’s a jet ski waiting out front, right?
Wave Race 64 (1996) Nintendo 64
The most fondly-remembered jet ski game of all time is the N64 version of Wave Race. It’s Wave Race 64. If you’re going a bit misty-eyed right now, don’t worry, we did too on first digging up this classic.
It was one of the first games to really, really get what this odd little racing sub-genre is all about – and the first on a console powerful enough to express that. The dance of the water against your jet ski, the way it flings you way up into the air if you time your jump right, not to mention how it feels to powersploosh around corners. And, yes, that’s our jet ski equivalent of the powerslide.
Today, the character models look incredibly basic, but that feel is really still there. Wave Race 64 was pretty much the inspiration for every other jet ski game that would follow.
Diddy Kong Racing (1997) Nintendo 64
“Wait a minute, this isn’t a jet ski game,” you might well think. Rare’s ape-flavoured take on Mario Kart is not an out-and-out jet ski racer, but the hovercraft-like vehicles you can take on in the water races are effectively identical to jet skis.
One of the more dynamic elements of this supremely accessible Mario Kart homage is that in many races you can actually have multiple types of vehicles in play at once. A hovercraft versus a biplane probably doesn’t sound fair. And it kinda isn’t. But it certainly is fun.
While Rare canned a sequel that replaced vehicles with animals, Nintendo has reportedly been looking into making Diddy Kong Racing 2 from time to time, with rumours of the game popping up as recently as last year. We still have our fingers crossed.
Jet Moto (1996) PS1
For most people, jet ski console history is dominated by the Wave Race family. But there were others out there too. Jet Moto was a PS1 series that made its debut way back in 1997, two months before the seminal Wave Race 64 arrived in Europe.
Not content with ‘making do’ with jet skis that stay on the water, this is a futuristic racer where they hover, able to skim over any surface. There is some water, sure, but this style saved the developers from needing to come up with water effects anywhere near as flashy as Wave Race 64’s. From a more positive angle, it enabled some really out-there track designs. There were three Jet Moto games, but after Jet Moto 3 failed to sell all that many copies, the series more or less sank without trace. Oh well.
Wave Race: Blue Storm (2001) GameCube
Want Wave Race 64, but with nicer graphics? That’s more or less what Wave Race: Blue Storm for Gamecube is. In fact, reviewers criticised it initially for being all too much like the Nintendo 64 version.
Fair enough, some of the tracks are eerily familiar, but a decade on that’s no bad thing. It feels just like playing the N64 version. But with graphics your nephew or niece would only turn their nose up at, not openly ridicule you for. It’s a shame Nintendo hasn’t got made a Wii U version already, or at least a port of this oldie, because it’s still great fun to play today.
Splashdown (2001) PS2/Xbox
The defining jet ski series of the PS2 was Splashdown. The console’s answer to Wave Race, which was on lock down as a Nintendo-owned series, it’s not all that well-remembered, but it was pretty great.
The first Splashdown game is pretty sensible, offering a not-quite-realistic-but-not-totally-bonkers take on the jet ski racer, before the sequel went totally off piste, if you’ll excuse the water-based pun. Splashdown 2: Rides Gone Wild severed all ties with reality, opting for a much larger-than-life style, with more than a few hints of rollercoaster about it. Both are great, but show you two ways to go when making a jet ski jolly.
Jet X2O (2002) PS2
Riding the wave (geddit?) of extreme sports titles, which were extremely popular at the rime, Jet X2O put its focus on extreme courses that made the game feel a little like a motorised take on white-water rafting. It doesn’t edge out Splashdown on the quality stakes, but back then was a good demo of the sorts of graphical effects developers could pull out of the PS2 system.
Jet X2O features eight courses – not many by today’s standards – but they’re packed with scenery variety and multiple routes. More than 10 years on, this probably isn’t a game to dig too deep into, but with an emphasis on OTT tricks and visuals, it’s still good for a quick blast.
Rat on a Jet Ski (2012) Mobile
There’s an ocean’s worth of dreadful jet ski games available for phones. And one really fantastic one, which you can see below.
However, in Android/iPhone second place comes a game that’s totally different to everything else here. It’s Rat on a Jet Ski, a themed endless runner. Given there are five ‘Rat on a...’ games available on Android, you might expect it to be little more than a way to get you to look at loads of ads, but it’s remarkably good.
A liberal dollop of 16-bit flavour makes it feel more like a classic platformer than most endless runners. But if you want the real jet ski arcade experience on your phone, there’s only one place to go…
Riptide GP2 (2013) Mobile/Xbox One
Capturing the soul of Wave Race and bringing it to phones, Vector Unit’s Riptide GP and Riptide GP2 look great, feel great and have the mechanics of jet sky racing nailed down.
The second game has a deeper career mode, better graphics and more tricks, making it the go-to choice if you’ve not played either yet. These games are dying to be called ‘console-quality’, and, guess what, Riptide GP2 has come to Xbox One.
It’s no surprise Vector Unit smashed it out of the park with these Riptide games. It’s the developer behind Hydro Thunder Hurricane, the 2010 reboot of the classic powerboat racer series.
