Tropical Angel is an obscure 1983 arcade game, developed and distributed by Irem. In it you play a female water skier who must score points – and stay on her skis – on a series of increasingly more challenging water courses.

You control the skier using a joystick and two buttons – one for increasing speed and one for performing a ‘trick’. By pressing the trick button the skier will spin 180 degrees and then water-ski backwards until the button is pressed again. You can’t steer the skier when facing backwards, but you do earn bonus points for the duration of the trick.

By moving the skier left and right you must avoid rocks; pass through a set number of gates; jump on ramps for bonus points; avoid collisions with buoys, and basically stay upright for the duration of the course, until you reach the finish line. There’s also a shark that appears occasionally, and if you collide with it it’s an instant ‘game over’.

There are two key things you need to master to get good at Tropical Angel. The first is to know when to apply speed, and when to slow down. You hold the speed button down to accelerate to top speed, and release it to slow down. If you slow down too much, though, you’ll fall over, so you have calculate when to increase speed again after slowing down for a few seconds. Slowing down gives you more time to manoeuvre into better positions to hit jump ramps, go through gates, or avoid rocks. The second key thing to learn is how and when to turn left and right. Which you can only do with practise. With repeated play you might begin to notice that insisting on going ’round a particular set of rocks a certain way will always result in you falling, so you have to remember those and turn the opposite way. This might sound counter-intuitive, and it only becomes apparent after playing the game for a while. Also: if you want to hit a particular jump ramp, or ski between a set of narrow buoys, you’ll have to coordinate your speed and turn rate; slowing down as you approach; lining-up; then speeding up as you enter the target area. It’s a tricky skill to master at first, but with practise you’ll figure it out.

Tropical Angel was only available as a conversion kit* from Irem and no dedicated cabinets were ever made, so it was somewhat rare in arcades during the mid-Eighties.

*= Arcade conversion kits basically allowed operators to take an older machine that wasn’t making money any more; switch out the PCB (Printed Circuit Board); adapt the controls, and change the cabinet decals to create a different game (one that would hopefully generate revenue again), without the expense of having to buy a whole new arcade machine.

As far as I know, no conversions were ever made of Tropical Angel to home systems, although it probably influenced a few clones. It was one of the earliest relatively realistic water skiing video games ever made and also had the novelty of having a bikini-clad skier’s butt-crack in view for the duration of the game. Which was pretty ‘cheeky’ back in 1983.

Tropical Angel is still a playable and fun game now, and is currently (at the time of writing) available on the Antstream retro gaming service.

More: Tropical Angel on arcade-history.com
More: Tropical Angel on YouTube