When I heard I had to write about a game that I think is not fun, my thoughts immediately turned to the one game I ever got as a present and tried my hardest to grit my teeth and bear it, but I just couldn’t get more than a few minutes in. I’ve only played it once before, and I was so bored and frustrated that after a few minutes of torture, I turned it off and vowed to never play it again. Now that I have to write about it, I decided to give it one more shot, and see if it’s as awful as I remembered. This game is Shark Tale for the Playstation 2.
Sure, I’m guessing that this game is aimed towards a younger age group than I fit into, but the last time I played this was when I was a kid, and I hated it then for the same reasons that I hate it now. That’s because it’s NOT FUN. But what takes the fun out of this game?
Sound
There isn’t a whole lot of anything special going on with the sound in this game, since there are regular voiceovers and ocean sounds just like one would expect. However, I found the music in this game to be cheesy and annoying “street” music, which fit the game I suppose, but bugged me the more that I heard it. After a while, the music in itself got on my nerves and made me want to stop playing the game.
Story
The story of this game felt forced, and more-or-less relied on the fact that the player has probably seen the Shark Tale movie if they’re playing the game. From what I saw in the time I played the game, the plot jumped in random intervals, covering some basics from the movie, but not really making as much sense as it could going from one plot point to another. This is one reason why I hate games based on movies so often – the game developers make the game not to be great to play through on its own, but just to give to kids to mess around with if they already know and like the movie. There’s no substance or interest value to it at all, and so I think the quality of writing in this game is very poor. After all, they just took the story from the movie and mutilated it to fit it into the game. This made the game irritating rather than fun.
Game Flow
The flow of Shark Tale as a game was little short of awful for me. The game was divided into “missions” which didn’t flow together well at all. There would be one mission, which felt like a really bad mini-game, and then the next would be completely unrelated to the previous ones. The whole game felt extremely jerky and disjointed in this way, and it didn’t help at all that each mission was announced with a separate “mission screen”, including a cheesy cut-scene that would zoom out into the front page of a newspaper (one of my least favourite clichés), which didn’t work too well for me to make this game seem whole. In the end, this game felt like a bunch of uninteresting mini-games squished together into one random package called Shark Tale.
Game Play Mechanics
The game play mechanics, which are immensely important in any game, were not too great in Shark Tale. They were constantly changing from mission to mission, since each mini-game was completely different from the one before. However, these mechanics consisted mostly of simple and boring concepts such as pressing the right arrow key at the right time, or wandering for a long time until you find something you’re looking for, or even a frustrating rhythm-based segment where you have to press the right buttons at the right time, and in the right order. There was also the fact that some of the controls didn’t work quite the way they should. At times, direction didn’t make any sense, since sometimes I’d have to press the right arrow to go straight, or other confusing mix-ups. In addition to that, the system of circling items to pick them up didn’t always turn out so well; often, Oscar would get stuck as I was trying to get him to make a full circle.
It looked like the game developers tried to throw in some action-adventure elements, such as a button to make Oscar dash forward and crash through crates (and sometimes fish), but this move seemed rather pointless, since there was only one opportunity to use it, and it was just to move some crates out of the way. I felt that they could have done so much more with their game play mechanics, but these ended up feeling dull and pointless in every mission. Not exactly fun, if you ask me.
Level Design
Not only did the game play mechanics change drastically from one mission to another, but each mission was equally boring yet more frustrating than the last. The first level, or mission, I played in the game was incredibly simple and boring. As my character, Oscar, was being chased by a shark, I had to press the button for the arrow that flashed on the screen every few seconds. There was no fun to this because it was such a simple, repetitive task that I could’ve been folding papers instead and having just as much fun as playing this game.
The next mission was to make circles around falling objects to catch them before they hit the ground. It’s pretty sad that I can say this was the most fun in all of the missions I played, and it was still very mediocre and not worthwhile to play. After all, like the last mission, it was repetitive, and had no “pow” to it to make it any fun at all. Once again, it felt like another boring, lazy job opposed to an actual game.
The third mission brought on not only my boredom, but also frustration with this game. Essentially, I had to make Oscar travel through a 3D city with 2D controls and very little freedom, looking for a kid I was supposed to find. However, repetition strikes again, because every street I passed looked the same to me, until I couldn’t tell when I was passing the same areas over and over again. Not only that, but there was nothing to do except avoid annoying fish that would bump into you and take away your health (which was frustrating, not fun) and pick up random items at times – which were all pearls. There weren’t even different types of items I could collect. Worst of all, I was stuck in this horrible level for quite some time because it’s so easy to get lost in a city that looks the same everywhere you go. This level was not only not fun, but downright aggravating.
The last level I played was also the last level I reached when I played this game as a kid. That’s because this level is once again completely unrelated to any level before it, and consists of Oscar showing off and dancing, making this a rhythm-based segment. Now I already didn’t like this part because I’m no good at rhythm-based games, but it didn’t help that the pace of this mission was relatively fast, and the game threw a lot of moves at you at once. If this game is aimed towards kids as I suspect, this mission would be a little on the hard side for them. It doesn’t help that each level is so very different from the one before, and you can’t skip missions, so if you’re no good at one type of game, you can’t finish this game. That’s what made me hate this game more than anything else as a kid.
User Interfaces
The first issue I can think of with the user interfaces is the fact that they changed every level. One level would require a health bar, the next would require an interface in the corner showing the player how much money they have, and the next level would have neither. The constant change in interfaces made me forget that they were ever there in the first place, so I wouldn’t think to check my health, or money, or anything else. This makes their whole use of user interfaces somewhat pointless in the end due to lack of consistency.
Artificial Intelligence
The A.I. in this game was virtually non-existent in the time that I played this game. Everything going on in every level was predetermined; whether it was which arrow you have to press, or where items fall for you to pick up, or anything else that went on. A little bit of A.I. use might have made this game more interesting, but alas, this game is far from interesting.
All in all, this game is boring and exasperating, not to mention it feels more like work than a game. Shark Tale’s largest flaws are strangely contradictory to each other. Each level of the game is maddeningly repetitive in itself, yet it doesn’t even have enough connection to any other level to make the game elements flow well together. Also, each level is either so easy that it’s incredibly boring, or takes a frustratingly long time to beat. Shark Tale is by far the worst console game that I have ever owned, and most likely the worst that I have ever played.
Image Sources:
"Shark Tale - PS2 - Review." Gamezone. 6 Oct. 2004. Web. 17 Jan. 2011. http://ps2.gamezone.com/reviews/item/shark_tale_ps2_review/.
"Shark Tale (PS2)." Gamespot. CBS Interactive Inc., 10 Dec. 2004. Web. 17 Jan. 2011. http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/action/sharktale/images/0/1/.
"Shark Tale (video game)." Wikipedia. 22 Aug. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Tale_(video_game).
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