Surfing is a glamorous sport. You play basketball on a square of concrete. Football, American or European, is played on an often muddy field. Boxing is done upon a sweaty patch of canvas. Skiing, which happens on a snowy mountain and is also glamorous, is freezing cold. Surfing is generally done where the sun is shining and the beach living is omnipresent. Unlike other sports, you could set out to go surfing, decide not to surf at the last second, and still have a wonderful day at the beach. Try that with, say, collegiate wrestling... you're sitting indoors on wooden bleachers around a bunch of smelly gym mats.
That's not a problem at the Titan Surf Club, which is the aesthetic opposite of collegiate wrestling. TSC has a tropical island setting. It looks very much like the shore of the island that Gilligan and the Skipper crashed the SS Minnow onto. If you go there alone, you stand a chance of eventually befriending a volleyball.
Of course, you aren't at TSC to talk to volleyballs, you're there to surf.
It's not that different from surfing in real life, other than you're not in the ocean, you don't need balance, you don't exercise skills, a shark can't eat you, you don't get wet, you don't have to hang around with Spicoli-type people, you won't drown... OK, it's very different from surfing in real life.
What you do is get a surfboard, hop onto it, paddle out, meet the waves (TSC has a perpetual swell coming in), and see what you can do with them. I don't really speak Surfer and will not be able to name the moves I was doing, but I'd go up on the lip, inside the tube, back out of it, and onto the beach. I'm don't know for sure if it is possible to wipe out, but I didn't wipe out, so I assume it is impossible.
There are only two waves at the sim, which is good in that they are always there and ready for surfing, but is bad in that a great part of surfing involves analyzing incoming swells, picking the right one, etc... but that is a small complaint. It is easily offset by "You can show up there and be surfing in 2 minutes, with no prep time at all."
The waves are pretty cool in and of themselves. They never roll towards the beach, instead of staying in the same place. They do a neat job of simulating the wave breaking, so you can hit it with your surfboard and ride the lip or the tube. Other than aiming the camera as I was moving, I had no difficulty getting pictures of myself at the height of my ride.
Someone should make a sim like Apocalypse Now, where you have to lead a helicopter attack on a Vietcong stronghold in order to take the beach to surf at. I'd do it myself, but I'm more of an Idea Girl and have little talent for building things. They should also make surfing sims with one really bad wave, 40 feet high, the kind that did in Patrick Swayze in Point Break.
I should add that I am a bit of a storm chaser in real life, although I chase ocean storms instead of tornadoes. Hurricane Henri just missed my state (Massachusetts) and I was too lazy to drive through a hurricane into Connecticut. So, I was in a bad state of mind when I went to check waves on SL, although Titan Surf Club stopped that well enough.
I apologize for wearing a one-piece swimsuit. I don't know how T&A alters my viewership. I work as a wrestler, and a lot of my swimwear is aimed more at the ring than at the beach. I may rock some side-boob in some shots, I'm not sure. "Properly utilizing your tits" never came up in Journalism school, although it probably should have. Maybe if I went to Barbizon...
Titan Surf Club = http://maps.secondlife.com/
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