Aquanaut's Holiday

"When I woke up in the morning, I realized what that trip to the bargain bin had really cost me....."

Aquanaut's Holiday... A game like this, by all rights, should not exist. Allow me to theorize as to its origins. My theory is that the developer wanted to make a game that would appeal to the more stressed among us, those in need of relaxation. Some... New Age goodness, as it were. So this game.... exists. Basically, you pilot a little submarine around under the sea. And you just kinda drive it around. Sometimes you will find a fishie. Look, a fishie! Go talk to it. Mash the shoulder buttons. Your ship makes a bleeping noise. The manual says this does something... but that is all that's said. So you can be entirely content to look at the fishies. Every so often, you'll find a landmark of some kind, a mountain or a building or some such. But that happens, oh, once or twice in three hours? Not even remotely worth the time. The side thing that you do as an incentive for swimming back and forth over and over is build a coral reef. For the fishies to live in. And they come after a little while, but they're just the same fish you already saw. Boring. And that's truly all there is to the game. That and the fact that it takes up a monstrous five memory card slots. Trust me, you will not be playing this game for very long. This game went very wrong somewhere. The object was to look around the sea for things. What ends up happening is you float around in the same big blue thing for an hour on end, and nothing comes of it. The intended relaxation very quickly turns to boredom, which turns to frustration, which turns to violence. And violence is what you've got the rest of the games around for, right? This thing just ain't doing its job.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99