Reply With QuoteYou know, I misread that title as "Ecco Eaten by Jews." Which made no sense. Because I doubt dolphin is kosher.
Also, this sounds like an absurd premise for a game.
..chomp, chomp:
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040818/185038_1.html
'Majesco (OTCBB:MJSH - News), a leading publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment products, today announced that it has secured the interactive entertainment rights to one of the most enduring action-suspense films of all time, Universal Pictures' and Steven Spielberg's Jaws. Developed by Appaloosa, the video game is scheduled to ship in summer 2005 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the film's theatrical release.'
'In Majesco's Jaws, players assume the role of a Great White shark driven to a predacious frenzy by the sonic emanations of underwater oil drilling equipment. To defend their underwater territory, players undertake a campaign to drive the raiders away while simultaneously solving a series of action-based puzzles designed to thwart the player.'
Majesco seem to be getting more adventurous recently - first signing Psychonauts, now this. Anyhow, this game is, of course, not at all reminiscent of Ecco The Dolphin: Defender Of The Future on the Dreamcast/PS2, also developed by Appaloosa:
http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/534932.asp
Of course, if they sign up Tim Follin for the music and Tom Baker for the voice-over again, I'm in.
You know, I misread that title as "Ecco Eaten by Jews." Which made no sense. Because I doubt dolphin is kosher.
Also, this sounds like an absurd premise for a game.
This is another one of those 'tack a movie license onto a game already in development' deals, kind of like Sea Dogs 2/Pirates of the Caribbean. Appaloosa was already developing the game under the title Sole Predator. With the Jaws license, now they have a leg up on their competition, Pineapple Interactive's Bloody Waters shark game. That'll give them quite a bit of retail cachet.
Personally, I like the idea, although I wish they were taking a more dynamic life sim/GTA/Spider-Man 2 free-roaming approach rather than canned missions.
-Tom
Holy crapola, GTA featuring a shark sounds like a great idea. In my addled brain, at least.
Can you name yourself Bruce?
I'd rather have a GTA-style submarine game about Captain Nemo. You could attack whaling ships, trade with mermen, dally with mermaids, collect giant squid beaks, harvest pearls from giant oysters, etc.
Come on! You'd rather be this guy...Originally Posted by John Many Jars
...than this guy?
Seriously, though, the Nemo thing does sound cool. I love free-form underwater games. I really dug Aquanaut's Holiday, even if it was pointless, and I adored the whole Privateer-but-underwater vibe of the original Archimedean Dynasty. I was really disappointed by the promise squandered in a recent PS2 game called Everblue 2 where you dive around and look for treasure. So bring on the shark games, I say!
-Tom
For some reason I was interested in this question and looked it up. According to myjewishlearning.com, whale meat and oil are forbidden, for reasons that would also extend to dolphins.
Or better yet, Battlefield: Ocean.
Guess they don't like links. This actually makes sense if you put this in your browser: http://www.snopes.com/photos/graphics/shark2.jpg
I was thinking more about this guy:
(That's the Alan Moore League of Extraordinary Gentlemen version.)
Nice try, JMJ, but we all know that this:
...is Captain Nemo from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. :) In fact, I believe that's Michael Palin under that turban.
-Tom
Oh come on, I love Everblue 2! You've got exploring, puzzle solving, collecting, taking photos, and a nice RPG-lite system of steady advancement wrapped up in some pretty decent graphics. What's not to love?
Sorry for the wall of text, B.J. Bob, but since Games Domain doesn't seem to have their old reviews up yet, here's my problem with Everblue 2:
***
In 1996, there was a weird little Playstation game called Aquanaut's Holiday. Only it wasn't so much a game as one of those software toy experiments that just confused people. You explored an underwater environment from inside a little submarine. You looked at fish and made noises at them and wondered if they were reacting to you (they seemed to be). There was some sort of coral reef building subgame that didn't really go anywhere, so the entire game had a languid directionless floaty feel. But it was strangely relaxing and tranquil. It was unique. A year later, Treasures of the Deep came out for the Playstation. You had 14 missions to complete. You had weapons on your sub. You blew stuff up. That was pretty much the direction the underwater genre took from that point.
Now comes Everblue 2, which isn't so much a sequel as an import from Japan with a number after the title for no good reason. Everblue 2 is much more in the spirit of Aquanaut's Holiday. There's no combat, although there are dangerous fish you have to avoid. You collect items and take photographs, selling them for money, which you use to buy better equipment, which lets you dive deeper where you can collect more items and take more photographs to sell for more money. As you go, you're performing quests that progress the desultory storyline about a diver stranded on a happy-go-lucky Caribbean isle. You advance in military titles. You keep a photo album of fish pictures. People give you seashell gifts in return for certain accomplishments. You accumulate a stash of valuables. Everblue 2 is an underwater quest/collecting/exploration game. Fans of Aquanaut's Holiday rejoice!
Or not. Great concept, shame about the execution. The first problem is the actual diving. The sound consists almost solely of a breathing loop, which is somewhat realistic but misses out on the opportunity for a lot of ambiance. The graphics are disappointing in comparison to other Playstation 2 titles. Although there are some nice textures in some of the underwater area, the viewing distance is horribly limited. These waters are more like a murky lake than anything you'll find in the real Caribbean. Rather than things gradually emerging from the distance, there's a strict viewing distance that robs the game of any sense of what diving really looks like, where inscrutable shapes resolve into blurred lines and eventually hard objects. There are parts of the game that take place in dark sunken ships that look suitably eerie, but they're the equivalent of canned dungeons that look as if they were ripped from a Silent Hill game.
One of the most damning problems is that the sea life doesn't look very good. The assortment of small colorful fish darting around look good, but the larger creatures -- and face it, these guys are the payoff -- seem to have low resolution textures stretched across their frames when you get close to them. To prevent you from getting too close to any of the creatures, though, the developers at Arika have severely limited your freedom of movement.
Arika apparently doesn't understand that diving is like flying, with a significant vertical component. In fact, that's sort of the whole point. You move *down* under the water, then you come back *up* when your air runs out. As you're diving you soar over objects and vary your height to navigate coral and currents and kelp. But here, diving take place on a flat plane along the bottom of the ocean. You cannot swim down to get a closer look at something. You cannot swim up to get a better overview of the area. Everblue 2 has more in common with driving an underpowered car through thick fog than scuba diving.
Finding loot is like a separate puzzle game. You have a sonar type interface that pings faster as you get closer to hidden objects. This means the game plays like an underwater version of ?Marco Polo? where you send out a ping and see how quickly you get a response. As you get closer, you have to bracket the item by sending the pings in different directions and narrowing down which direction to move. There's no visual component to this searching; items just appear ex nihilo when you're in the right place. As you play through Everblue 2's quests, you earn new components to put into your sonar so it will detect different types of items. The whole system feels like it was tacked onto the game to give you busywork while you're underwater.
To be fair, the developers are presenting a stylized version of diving in which your hit points and your air supply are resources that determine how far you can go and how much loot you can gather. If you go beneath a certain depth, you take damage to represent your suit not protecting you from the temperature. If you carry too much loot beyond the capacity of your bag, you take damage to represent getting tired. If you run out of air, you take damage to represent, well, not breathing. You can bring along medicine to heal up damage and prolong your dive, at the expense of storage space in your bag. It's an effective way to create a sense of urgency, but it ultimately feels like a series of contrived limitations to keep you out of certain areas until the rigid mission structure unlocks them.
The missions are doled out from static 2D screens that look like an old adventure game. You use the analog stick to move a cursor on screen, choosing a character to talk to or an exit to another screen. You move from screen to screen, following dialogue chains, visiting shops, and gathering quests. It all seems like a way to distract you from the weak diving portions of the game. But it doesn't work, because the storyline features such ridiculous contrivances as diving to find the ingredients to make aspirin for someone's grandmother, who has back pain. Ugh. If this sort of silliness is what it takes to make an underwater exploration game, better to stick with traditional RPGs. Everblue 2 is enough to make a guy want to dig up an old copy of Aquanaut's Holiday.
***
How's that? :)
-Tom
But this game sounds like it will be more like the Sega Genesis game Ecco the Dolphin. Where you had to solve puzzles like pushing blocks to make more blocks move. Rather than fighting the shark triads and stealing shark cars and running from the shark police.
Ecco for the Genesis was actually a pretty good game for its time.
Ha ha! Yeah, as if the game is going to blow up and be the next GTA and it will need to have its numbering correct in order to cash in on translating the other games like Final Fantasy.
In any case, I think you're review is spot on and has very good criticisms if you come at the game as a laid-back diving simulation or adventure like Aquanaut's Holiday. However, I do think there's that sticky ever-present problem of different expectations between cultures and its especially relevant to what you seem to have gotten out of the game.
This is going to sound really weird, but its not a vacation game in the sense that you get to dive in exotic places, but in the sense that its so much less about skill than other good games. You can't get really good at Everblue and its not very deep (ha ha, but seriously, its so surfacely simple) that there's no way you can "compete" for something inside it. Which is important for a vacation game.
As for what is a good vacation game and what isn't, well, Everblue 2 mostly got B-level reviews here, almost all across the board. The big difference I think, is for one, we weren't expecting much with the graphics, so everyone said, "Ah! Kirei! This is so beautiful." It was good at representing the basics and the details they wanted (the items you can find, the fish and the townspeople) in the way they were expecting and that's all that mattered. Reviews over here mention it has so many items to collect, so many people to meet and so many fish to take pictures with for the aquarium that there's a lot to meet your interest whenever you lazily decide to relax and play the game and that the elements are enough to make a game, but not enough to create anything resembling taxing, tense or challenging.
Now why would you ever WANT a game like this when there's so much better out there, in terms of depth? In terms of challenge? In terms of representation, art and graphics? In terms of simulation? In terms of even telling a good story on game terms? Indeed, there are games much worse than Everblue about this (Neverland Chronicles comes to mind, as does DOA Beach Volleyball), games roughly the same amount of quality (the Fish Eyes series), relatively speaking and games much, much better (Country Livin' and My Summer Vacation 2). I'm not claiming Everblue 2 is some kind of masterpiece if you see it from a different perspective, but that its flaws and positives can be construed along a different line and as always, my country sucks at advertising why a certain game was developed and who its aimed at.
Actually, I was going to e-mail you about this, because the whole issue about these type of games concerns what I was going to send you before. :mrgreen: It basically cuts to a recent issue about how far developers (well, developers over here) are willing to take games lately.
-Kitsune
That's seriously the funniest pic I've seen lately.Or better yet, Battlefield: Ocean.
Guess they don't like links. This actually makes sense if you put this in your browser: http://www.snopes.com/photos/graphics/shark2.jpg
Funny.
Hey, I remember that review! That's the first time I heard about the game, and it convinced me to buy it. Seriously.
Don't you remember Mr. Yukk, from the public service messages during cartoons? "Mr. Yukk is meeeean, Mr. Yukk is GREEN! muhahahahahaha!!!"That's seriously the funniest pic I've seen lately.Or better yet, Battlefield: Ocean.
Guess they don't like links. This actually makes sense if you put this in your browser: http://www.snopes.com/photos/graphics/shark2.jpg
I'm no marine biologist, but isn't that a whale Tom?...than this guy?
Well... I can't really explain in english why Jews won't eat dolphins so I'll simplify it: It's a mammal, it has no feet!
-Shiroko
Shiroko, it's a Great White Shark with a hapless seal in his mouth. It is far too bad-ass to be a namby-pamby whale. Unlike the thing hanging from Batman's cape, which I think it a Yorkshire Terrier.I'm no marine biologist, but isn't that a whale Tom?
-Tom
Does this call for the bat shark-repellant?
I was reminded of this thread while playing A Dog's Life, a new PS2 game in which you're -- wait for it! -- a dog. It's pretty free-form, with a variety of activities, challenges, and collectibles. I like the pacing so far, and it has it's own quirky charm. But I really wish it was about, say, a 20-foot-long Great White Shark instead of a mutt with a dopey voiceover cracking jokes a la Looks Who's Talking.Personally, I like the idea, although I wish they were taking a more dynamic life sim/GTA/Spider-Man 2 free-roaming approach rather than canned missions.
-Tom
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