Tuesday 03 Feb 2009

When I first read about Endless Ocean I was intrigued - a game consisting of swimming around in the ocean looking at fishes and generally just taking it easy? Sounds great! When I mentioned the same to some friends they thought it sounded like boredom in a box and that I was crazy. If that’s your response I’m not sure I’ll be able to convince you otherwise, but in my opinion this is precisely the kind of game that tells me video gaming is maturing, diversifying and becoming a better form of entertainment every year.

You play as a diver, off to dive in the idyllic and highly diverse dive spots off Manaurai Island. To start off you select your diver’s traits; this amounts to selecting a male or female, blonde or brunette and entering your name, so the customization level is very low (although you do receive another hair style or two during the course of play). Once you’ve made these momentous decisions you’re off on your first dive to experience the restfulness of the Manaurai sea.

Play with the fishes

Your first dive is into the lagoon area, a shallow pool of water with a reef that houses a number of fish species. The underwater vistas are rendered beautifully (although they do lack a little bit in detail compared to real diving), and watching the fish swim to and fro on the currents or after the food you throw out for them is very relaxing. It’s like watching a fish tank – if you’re a person that gets bored with fish tanks you will likely tire of this very quickly, but if you’re mesmerized and relaxed by real life fish lazily wafting about then you will find much to interest you in Endless Ocean. Your long term task is to catalogue all the fish in the Manaurai sea – to add a fish to your log you simply have to interact with it a little by doing things like poking it or feeding it or whistling for it. The Wii interface makes this a little more tactile because as you dive a cursor shows on the screen acting as your “hand.” You can select a fish by pressing the A button when your hand is over it, in which case your view will lock on to that fish and its species name will appear (if you know it already of course). To learn more about the species, simply watch it for a while, perhaps stroke it (I’m not sure that real life fishes enjoy being stroked) or feed it. After a while more detail will appear in your species log, rewarding you for your “research.”

When you’ve enjoyed watching the fish for a while it’s time to go on board the Gabbiano, the little boat your share with Catherine, your boss/assistant person. She doesn’t swim, so you’re her eyes underwater, but she seems to be the one organizing things on the boat. It must be added that the entire budget for the game must have gone on the graphics for the animals because the humans don’t look or move nearly as realistically. You’ll soon start receiving emails requesting a guided dive or a photo of a certain fish for a magazine, and it’s up to you when or whether to respond to these. To start with you are not able to dive at night, and not able to go into very deep areas, but over time you will be rewarded with the equipment necessary to do so. Each area of the seas around Manaurai has different aquatic life, from manta rays to blue marlins to manatees, gobies and all manner of things in between. Your first view of a whale is a sight to remember – the fish are really stunningly rendered and move very realistically.

Exploration and photography

If you respond to a guided dive email the client soon arrives and tells you what specific species they want to see and which area they’re most interested in. After the dive they will grade your performance as a guide based on whether their expectations were met. For the most part it really isn’t difficult to get a good grade though, as long as you find the species they most want to see and dive for a good while with them they’ll be ecstatic. There is nothing particularly challenging about Endless Ocean – even training the dolphins you meet is simply a matter of pressing a few buttons to select a trick. That’s not to say the game is not interesting – it is. The amount of ocean available to explore is quite impressive, and there are a variety of areas from shallow reefs to deep gulfs. Finding new species is always fun, especially the big ones, and I particularly enjoy taking beautiful photos with the underwater camera.

It might be off-putting to gamers that there is no real activity in the game except to swim around and look at things. But the shell put around that in the form of your tasks, guidance from Catherine, and the catalogue to fill, means you do have a goal most of the time and you’re not always just aimlessly swimming. Of course, if the idea of swimming around looking for the perfect photo opportunity of a blue tang does not sound fun then Endless Ocean is not for you. I found it a very pleasant diversion from the more frenetic types of games that make up the majority of any console’s catalogue. Having said that I think that a better game framework (even a broad one like in, for example, Animal Crossing) would make it even more enjoyable as it will give you more focus for your daily jaunt in the ocean.

Pros: Beautiful underwater scenery; realistic creatures; relaxing music; variety of locations and species.

Cons: Limited numbers of fish; rather strange interaction with fishes; poor human animations; not enough photo assignments.

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Contributor:	Peter

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