Splashdown is a water Racing Game series developed by Rainbow Studios. Only two installments were released: Splashdown (2001) for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, published by Infogrames, and Splashdown: Rides Gone Wild (2003) for PlayStation 2 and mobile phones, published by THQ. It's like MX vs. ATV but in water and more cartoon-like.
In the Splashdown videogames, players drive Sea-Doo watercrafts in stadiums or world/fantasy tracks, somewhat like the Nintendo Wave Race games. Players have to follow the arrows on the buoys or else they will slow down. They can earn points by doing stunts in the air.
Splashdown contains examples of:
- Action Girl: All of the female racers, but the most clear-cut example would be the first game's Juana, whose bio describes her as a bodybuilder. In her ending, Amman Ra tries to steal her trophy, which ends with her giving him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
- The Bermuda Triangle: Both games have their own takes on it among their courses. In the first game, it's a straightforward maritime graveyard full of wrecked ships and stormy weather. The Bermuda Blast track in Rides Gone Wild is a bit more interesting, as it starts out as a short track with a sunny tropical island environment. Once the player nearly reaches the end of the lap, however, they're warped to a stormy open ocean world where lost and wrecked ships and airplanes clutter the map and new ones spawn from the sky. There's also a group of stranded men who get abducted by aliens. Near the end of the final lap, the player warps back to the original environment to end the race there.
- Border Patrol: A very creepy version in the first game where, if you go too far out of the track, then a giant squid tentacle pulls the rider underwater and then throws you back to your original position.
- Denser and Wackier: Rides Gone Wild distinguishes itself from the first game by having the courses run through a variety of fantastical environments while the racers have more distinctive, larger-than-life personalities. That said, the handling physics on the watercraft remain grounded in reality.
- Disaster Movie: The Downtown Downpour track in Rides Gone Wild is themed after this, being set in the streets of a town as it's destroyed by a flood.
- Dumb Jock: Andy in Rides Gone Wild is portrayed as a rather airheaded hunk.
- Fan Disservice: Played for Laughs in Haily's ending in the first game, where she celebrates by doing a sexy photoshoot. It starts off normally, with the photographer telling her to make sexy poses, and then he starts telling her to pose like a lemur or a bat, which involves her making extremely goofy animal poses that aren't sexy at all.
- The Great Flood: The Downtown Downpour track in Rides Gone Wild is set in a flooded city.
- Haunted Castle: The Blackwater Castle track in Rides Gone Wild includes one, with the final lap featuring a Storming the Castle sequence.
- I Can See My House from Here: Andy can say this if he's in the air.
- Interface Screw: In Rides Gone Wild, the truth about the Bermuda Blast level reveals itself at the end of the "first lap" when the HUD starts flickering as the racers are sucked into the Bermuda Triangle, at which point the race really begins. It happens again at the end when the racers are spit back into the normal world.
- Land Down Under: Haily and Jeremy are both Australian. It's especially pronounced with Jeremy, whose ending in the first game has him doing a Steve Irwin parody.
- Le Film Artistique: Rafael's ending in the first game is a parody of one in which he tries to get into a three-way with Kyoko and Haily in Venice. They dump him. Off the bridge.
- Living Dinosaurs: The Dino Dominion track in Rides Gone Wild takes place in a Jurassic Park-like dinosaur theme park island. As the race progresses, some of the dinosaurs appear more threatening, and in the last lap the dinos are revealed to be animatronics.
- Moment Killer: Andy's ending in the first game has him trying to pick up bikini babes on the beach by impressing them with his status as a racing champion... only to get hit in the nuts with a football.
- Ms. Fanservice: The female racers, of course, are all clad in form-fitting swimsuits that show plenty of skin, though the most obvious examples are the Australian blonde Haily and, in Rides Gone Wild, the Spicy Latina Coral.
- Mayincatec: The Amazon River track in the first game winds through some vaguely Mesoamerican-ish temples.
- Oireland: Wrong Way in Rides Gone Wild, a ginger-haired racer with an extremely thick "Irish" accent.
- Pirate: The Cannonball Cove track in Rides Gone Wild is themed around this, with the main set piece revolving around a pirate ship attacking a fortress on a Caribbean island and the final lap revealing a massive store of Pirate Booty.
- Polar Bears and Penguins: The Polar Plunge track in Rides Gone Wild doesn't have polar bears, but it does have walruses, a different Arctic species, trying to eat penguins, along with a Viking longship buried in ice.
- Prospector: Sneaky Pete, one of the bonus characters in Rides Gone Wild, is one of these in classic fashion.
- Ramp Jump: Ramps are found across the tracks. Jumping from them provide a chance to perform stunts.
- Real Men Wear Pink: The German muscleman Sebastian's ending in the first game has him frolicking through a field of flowers in a manner straight out of The Sound of Music.
- Scenery Gorn: Rides Gone Wild introduces dynamic levels where the scenery and even the track layout can change during the race, sometimes dramatically. Oftentimes, it comes in this form, as parts of the map are blown up in spectacular fashion and reveal new routes.
- Shout-Out: In Rides Gone Wild...
- The Dino Dominion track is one big one to Jurassic Park. The Robotic Reveal during the final lap is this to another Michael Crichton story, Westworld.
- The Venetian Extreme track is one to James Bond.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Amman Ra, an Egyptian pop star with a very inflated sense of self-worth. His name is taken from an Egyptian god, his ending in the first game is a music video for his song "Victorious" that's entirely about how great he is, and in Rides Gone Wild, he always talks about himself in the third person.
- Spaghetti and Gondolas: Both games have tracks where you race through the canals of Venice.
- Spicy Latina: Juana in the first game, though the focus is more on her being an Action Girl. Rides Gone Wild replaces her with Coral, a more clear-cut example who speaks with a thick accent in a lot of Spanglish slang.
- Transforming Mecha: Kyoko's ending in the first game has her watercraft transform into a giant mech so that she can fight the killer robots that accost her.
- Trash Talk: The racers do a lot of this to each other in Rides Gone Wild.
- Tuxedo and Martini: The Venetian Extreme track in Rides Gone Wild is heavily inspired by James Bond-esque spy movies, with the plot of one happening in the background of the race as the secret agent Michael Hawke (who can later be unlocked as the best racer in the game) fights bad guys and blows up various parts of Venice.
- Überwald: The Blackwater Castle track in Rides Gone Wild is set in one straight out of Universal Horror, with the race going through a creepy medieval European village and castle that are haunted by ghosts, zombies, and other monsters.
- The Wild West: The Goldrush Rapids track in Rides Gone Wild includes desert canyons and mine caverns in an old west theme.
