TUAW preview: Billabong Surf Trip

Chillingo invited us out to the headquarters of surfwear manufacturer Billabong yesterday for a look at a new iPhone and iPad game called Billabong Surf Trip. The game is designed by a Portugese developer named Biodroid Entertainment (who told me that they've done some work on other consoles, but this is their first title for Apple's iOS). As you may have guessed from the name, the title is sponsored by Billabong, and features the ability to create a surfer and then send him or her around the world to take on the waves.

Before I sat down to play the game, I asked Billabong's PR Director Jim Kempton about why they'd gotten involved in an iPhone game, and he said the goal of the game was to "introduce people to what surfing is about, on the level that we're hoping to cast an interest anyway." You don't have to be a surfer to enjoy the game, but enjoying the game might get you interested in surfing, and thus the Billabong brand. "Just like the professional football or professional golf circuit, most people," said Kempton," are never going to be playing any more than messing around at the local golf club, but they can understand how it works, or what it means to go to Augusta, or Scotland, or these places."

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Chillingo and Biodroid make it a point to call the game an "arcade sim" -- while there are some sim elements (the wave system in the game was developed over a period of months in conjunction with university students), the actual gameplay is akin to Tony Hawk, with various flicks of the virtual joysticks allowing for combo tricks and points while your surfer jumps into the air in slow motion (or falls inelegantly off the board if you don't land it right).

The game uses real Billabong surfboards and wetsuits (of course), and as you level up by earning points and currency (called mondos), you can buy new suits to swim better at the game's eleven beaches. On a colder beach, for example, you need to use an insulated wetsuit, and wearing the right clothes will help you move faster and pull off tricks more easily.

One drawback is that the game is very hard -- while we were playing an early version, it was tough to pull off tricks in just the right way, and there wasn't a lot of feedback from the game as to what went wrong. Even in the game's first stage, when I was tasked with hitting three aerials off of a wave, the game's producer and I ended up scratching our heads as to how to get the timing just right. And even when the game's developer finally showed me how to do it, it looked easy enough, but I still needed to tweak my own timing. Like real surfing, it'll probably take practice to play Surf Trip just right.

But for surfers especially, the game seems like a somewhat realistic recreation of the sport -- even without hitting the correct tricks, I could still find myself riding in a wave and guiding the board back and forth on the water. Each beach in the game has its own signature wave profile, and Biodroid worked with Portugese surfer Tiago Pires to get the mechanics and locations exactly right.

That's what draws Kempton to the game: "For me it's the non-arcade side -- they've got all of the locations that are true to the real thing, from Costa Rica, and I've been to all of these places. They got the wave right, they got the lineups right, they went to some trouble to authenticate the pieces of the game that they were trying to instill." He says that the game is the first step of something Billabong hopes to expand on -- "there's this whole backstory that can be done, this whole set of future development that can be done."

We'll see if the game sinks or swims very shortly -- Chillingo hasn't yet announced a price or a release date, but we were told that it would be universal for both the iPad and the iPhone later this month.