Sea Life Safari

Rating Everyone Genre first-person-shooter Publisher Sierra Online External Links Official Sea Life Safari Website

Sea Life Safari is a port of a Wild Tangent developed PC game of the same name. The premise is that you are a photographer assisting a marine biologist by riding around in a submersible and taking photographs of sea life. The goal is to eventually get a picture of each creature in each of the several undersea locations. On top of that, each picture is rated based on attributes such as distance, centering, and how interesting the creature's behavior is at the moment of the picture.

Sound familiar? That's because it's essentially Pokemon Snap, minus the Pokemon, of course. It even borrows Snap's "hit things with pokeballs/fruit" (referred to as "gizmos" here) mechanic for interacting with your subjects so that they're doing something more interesting. Unfortunately, unlike in the game that inspired it, each creature only has one interaction that's set off by winging a gizmo anywhere within the same geographical region as it. Sadly, the interaction is usually limited to the creature making a funny face. A collection minigame is also present in each level, requiring you to land a gizmo near ten different golden sea-shells in each level. Thankfully the hit boxes on these sea-shells are very generous, as the controls can get very sluggish, making precision aiming of your gizmos often a hopeless undertaking. Never mind trying to perfectly center a darting squid.

Although the game is graphically pleasing, it is by no means spectacular, which makes the frequent slow-down and stuttering camera pans all that more puzzling. The most advanced effect you'll see in this game is the faked underwater caustics on the sea bottom, which shouldn't be killing the frame rate like this. Playing the game made me think "This plays like a bad port." before I even knew it was a port.

Obviously Wild Tangent was aiming at kids with this product. If nothing else, giving almost every fish a goofy face should give that away. It seems the artists were attempting to ape Pixar's style to some extent, but they missed how Pixar emphasizes making their sea creatures look authentic first and adding facial expressions to them second. Also, for a "kid's game" the difficulty is a bit wonky. It's not that the game is, or should be, particularly hard, but that the requirements to progress in levels are linked to playing earlier levels over and over again until you've achieved most of the stars in them. Most of that will consist of fighting the camera controls and waiting for fish to turn and face you instead of giving you the cold shoulder. At least Snap provided new areas to explore and new events to set off when you replayed its levels.

I think a big opportunity was missed here considering this game was aimed directly at children. The after-mission review of photographs all pretty much follow the formula "Nice Long-nosed Gar!" No effort is made to tell you anything about a fish other than it's name. This could have been a fun environment to teach kids about marine life, and anything that can be done to try and encourage kids' interest in the sciences is a good thing. In the end, Sea Life Safari fails to pull off on a seventh generation console what was easily done on a fifth generation console. If you're looking for a game to keep your kids busy, Pokemon Snap is the same price on the Wii's Virtual Console, more fun, and arguably more educational.