Save the Whales

"An intresting, yet difficult game."

This game, Save the Whales, was originally meant to be a game whose sales went towards an environmental group. Sadly though, this game was only ever made as a complete prototype and was not publicly sold. Lately however, some people have managed to find copies of the prototype, and in addition to some copies being available in the world today, it was also put up as a now commonly found ROM on websites such as Atari Age.

Now, the game itself, I will describe at rate in multiple categories. They categories include: story, gameplay, graphics, control, sound, and replayability. They will each be rated out of a maximum score of five.

Story: 4/5
Unlike many other Atari 2600 games, this had a pretty nice story. It is the time of year again, and the whales are trying to head to the lower and farther parts of the ocean, where they can safely mate with each other. Sadly, some cruel people are trying to kill them (whether it be for food, or simply for sport, is unknown) from ships high atop the sea. This includes harpoons, nets, and mines, which will be explained more in gameplay. Reacting to this threat is your group, who arrives in a submarine to protect the whales from these vicious attacks.

Gameplay: 4.5/5
This game is very fun for the most part. Even parts of the Atari 2600/7800 system have a great effect on the gameplay. The left difficulty switch determine the speed of the mines in the second part of the game (explained later), and the right difficulty switch determines whether the ships on top will drop harpoons or nets (more onto those later). Reset starts the game or restarts it if you die, and game select brings you to a demo version of the game (you basically watch the game play on its own, a lot like other games).

Now, in this game, you control the submarine. The whole time in the game, you are trying to protect the whales from projectiles and other weapons, but at the same time, trying not to get yourself into danger. The game is over when either five of the whales get hit and die, or if you get hit five times (the amount from both kinds is not combined into one).

Depending on where you plucked the right difficulty switch, the ship at the top will either drop nets, or harpoons at the whales. Both have the same effect, and they both will damage you or the whales (though they shouldn't hit you as long as you stay out of their way). The nets are bigger, fall slower, and are easier to shoot at. The harpoons, on the other hand, and smaller, fall faster, and are difficult to properly shoot at, making it a wise choice for players who want a higher difficulty.

Now the gameplay consists of two parts. In the first part, the ship will drop five of the weapons you chose with the right difficulty switch, and your goal is to shoot them without purposely running into them or them hitting/killing the whale. After five weapons have been dropped, a group of five mines will move closer to you from the side of the screen, going after your submarine this time. They keep coming closer, eventually running into you (the weapon disappears after it hurts you), but shooting at them will push them back some. They won't go away until you destroy all five of them, which will then result in the ship going back to the first part, dropping weapons. Then the cycle continues over and over.

This is not an easy game, and you must be really good to last even more than five minutes in this. It has a score which is nice; though it goes away each time you start a new game. You get 100 points for every harpoon or net you destroy, and you get 300 points each time you destroy all five of the mines. Getting 10,000 points is a good challenge to go for. This game is hard, but that doesn't make it bad at all.

There are also eight in-game modes to this game. Modes one to six determine how fast the ship at the top moves around and drops weapons (one being the slowest, six being the fastest, one is the default when you turn on the game). Modes seven and eight seem to be the same, and have no real differences. Modes seven and eight are really strange, and might just be the result of the game being an unreleased prototype. In those two modes, the game plays like normal, except the ship doesn't drop weapons, you are not on the screen and saving the whales since there is nothing attacking them, but you can still here the sound. I guess you could think of it like a mode to just sit back, relax for a bit, and watch the whales.

Graphics: 3.5/5
Now since this is Atari 2600, I'm judging the graphics based on what the Atari was capable of.

The background and setting of the game is very nicely presented, and it looks like an actual ocean, although some of the movable sprites are a little weird. For one, the whales look just like fish with big heads, and the mines look like red Xs, and they just do not seem to resemble mines at all.

That is the only real bad part though, and the graphics are nice for the most part.

Control: 4/5
The control is very fluent most of the time. It is sometimes a little bit tricky to correctly hit the harpoons, but that is about it.

There is really not much to say.
You just move around with the Atari joystick (or control pad depending on what kind of controller you are using) to move your submarine and you fire with the single button. It is also good to know that you can fire more than one thing at once. You can also move diagonally in this game, which is pretty nice for the most part.

Sound: 3/5
It is kind of like a mix here.

The weapons and movement sound fluent and nice for the most part.
There is no music in this game, similar to most other Atari 2600 games at the time (Pitfall II is a great example of an Atari 2600 game with music).
My complaint though is that the occasional sounds that the whales make and the ship sounds (which I really can not say exactly when they happen) are annoying for the most part, and sometimes they are just annoying to the ears.

Yet there are other parts of the game that have very nice and okay sound.

Replayability: 2.5/5
This is a game that you will play a few times in a row when you actually do play it, but for the most part, you will just play this game every now and then and not nearly as much as other arcade-like titles, such as Space Invaders for the Atari 2600.
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Overall Score: 8/10
This one is rated out of 10.

This is a very good game overall, and is worth downloading, or if you are extremely lucky, find the prototype version of for the Atari 2600.
Who knows, maybe somebody will make a complete homebrew of this game sometime.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/01/08

Game Release: Save the Whales (US, Canceled)