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I still don’t get Shark! Shark!


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5 minutes ago, stupus said:

It was an amazing classic 2 player game.

You might just not be that into classic games if it appears boring....That's pretty much how most everyone feels that didn't grow up with that style of gaming.

Am in my mid 40s, been playing games since my first Pong unit, loving my Evercade currently and have wrote up the 7800 reviews on AtariHq nearly 20 years ago.  I love classic gaming and grew up admiring the Intellivision from afar. I feel like the default response to some of these questions is to question someone’s classic gaming cred rather than answer the question :)

 

      Can you elaborate more? Do you feel it’s aged well? What do you think of the updated version?

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Ok, not trying to be insulting. People who grew up post 2000, and even post 1990 often just think liking classic gaming is nuts.

I guess my point was more if you don't get it then its hard to explain....I mean why like pacman, or qbert or really heck any pre 85 game?

It's just beautiful simplicity. At the time there were next to no 2 player simultaneous games...joust, Mario bros...very very few titles and i think the 2 player interaction was a huge part if it. The ability to work together or against each other...killing the shark, growing in size...

Simple stuff but it was and is tons of fun.

I don't know much of the new version but if better graphics gets my 7 yo daughter playing it with me more then I'm 100% hey ho lets go. :)

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57 minutes ago, stupus said:

Ok, not trying to be insulting. People who grew up post 2000, and even post 1990 often just think liking classic gaming is nuts.

I guess my point was more if you don't get it then its hard to explain....I mean why like pacman, or qbert or really heck any pre 85 game?

It's just beautiful simplicity. At the time there were next to no 2 player simultaneous games...joust, Mario bros...very very few titles and i think the 2 player interaction was a huge part if it. The ability to work together or against each other...killing the shark, growing in size...

Simple stuff but it was and is tons of fun.

I don't know much of the new version but if better graphics gets my 7 yo daughter playing it with me more then I'm 100% hey ho lets go. :)

The multiplayer angle makes sense. To this day I love a good round of Oink or Sneak N Peek so I get that. 

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IMHO it's separate from being a great multiplayer game.

 

With any of these classic games that were trying new things, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, it clicks with some people, it doesn't click with others.

 

Shark Shark has unique gameplay, it's not a shooter or a maze game... It does get pretty frantic once the pace picks up, and you can get in a zone trying to kill as many sharks as possible and avoiding the jellyfish and other things.  Yes it's fun multiplayer, but I like the game single player as well.  So I think maybe it's just one of those games you don't enjoy, and that's cool, not everyone is going to like everything.

 

No holding my breath for the remake, though it's on my radar.  The graphics seem too busy and crazy but I'm withholding judgment until I get a chance to see it.

Edited by BydoEmpire
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The game is still popular to this day as "Feeding Frenzy" which is available everywhere:

 

Feeding Frenzy - Eat Fish - Apps on Google Play

Feeding Frenzy | Xbox

 

And there is at least one sequel

Feeding Frenzy 2 (ea.com)

Feeding Frenzy 2 Deluxe on Steam (steampowered.com)

 

What's good about it?

  • It is easy to learn and hard to master.  You can quickly figure out how to eat another fish, but to really get a high score is very challenging.
  • It gives the player a sense of progress.  It is fun to make your fish get bigger and be able to eat the larger fish.
  • There are scoring options that aren't obvious at first.  You can get higher points by picking at the shark and interacting with some of the other creatures.

 

Will I play it for 1000 minutes over the course of a week?  No, but it is fun to play every so often and try to beat my high score.

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On 1/9/2022 at 6:01 PM, jerseystyle said:

Been watching classic footage, listening to YouTubers talking excitedly about the updated version… man I just don’t see it. Does this point to a dark, loveless place in my soul, or is the world nuts?

I think I find it appealing for several reasons:  there is no specific goal or time limit, just stay alive for as long as possible.  It doesn't require extraordinary skills or expertise.  It's not difficult, but when you fail and die, you know it is all on you; no blaming "Aw, it's this lousy joystick" etc.  

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On 1/11/2022 at 3:45 PM, ls650 said:

but when you fail and die, you know it is all on you; no blaming "Aw, it's this lousy joystick" etc.  

I agree with you on everything up to that sentence.   Every game I play on Intellivision ends with me blaming the controller.  ?   Hate that thing...

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We're talking the new Amico remake? youtube seems to think that Amico is the only new sharky-action. Full confession: I checked my Intellivision stack, and I don't have shark-shark, so I've likely never played the original. It's in that upcoming Evercade pack, and I'll probably try it then, but only single-player.

 

Other games I've played with the eat-to-get-big-enough-to-eat-more have been fun. I suppose katamari comes right to mind in the genre, or agar.io.

 

Gut reaction to the Amico Shark! Shark!, is that there's a bit of big-fish in the small pond framing going on. It does not instantly look like a killer app or system seller, in either the new or the original forms. I'm reminded of how I believed Tempest 2000 to be one of the best jaguar games, which it certainly is, but when I saw an arguably better port on saturn it was a pretty average game by that measure. Suddenly what I knew as a 9.5/10 level of game started looking more like a 7/10.

 

Moving over to Amico--this system ships with 'cornhole,' so Shark Shark looks damn FANTASTIC. Shark Shark's list of actual competition probably starts and ends with that new moon patrol game, so of course the fans on the 'tubes are going to be nuts over it. They want their new system to do something, and this does look to be among the best on the current menu. Amico is still going to be a fairly 'small pond,' even if the system exceeds it's wildest expectations.

Edited by Reaperman
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The Shark Shark concept was a popular flash game back when that was all the rage, If people are in that kind of generation of using the internet to play web games made out of flash (40 and below, I'm guessing) then it might be "nostalgia hit" as really that is only 15-20 years ago and not something that was sold as a full fledged game. In my absence of variation when I was young, I had never played an intellivision until I got disposable income. After I bought Shark Shark, I played it for longer than I really needed to because of the 'hit' I was getting from the Flash days when I used to play it. Motherload, Gemcraft and Desktop Tower Defence were other "flash" hits, some of which have moved successfully into other spheres than the free-zone.

 

That might be why people rave about it, casual quick fire fun.

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  • 1 month later...

Is there a difficulty setting on the original? It doesn't appear that my Evercade version provides for that if it does. The reason I mention it is that for the first few solid minutes, I believed Shark! Shark! was really living up to its love in this thread. But then it handed me a bunch of extra lives and I got bored with it. I wonder if maybe it's defaulting to 'difficulty level 1' or equivalent, but checking the option menu I see nothing to make it trickier.

 

Anyway, I did a quick review, and on initial pick-up-and-play, it's solid--which is probably the most important thing for an evercade title.

But like I said, I just couldn't be bothered to keep playing. I just look at my high, and even increasing, number of lives and I start wondering if it's ever going to end. A difficulty switch would pretty much solve that.

 

 

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Shark shark reminds me of the many "avoid the obstical" games currently available on android devices, think flap and such as that. Avoid the tower of sea weeds while eating fish and avoiding the shark.

 

Atari 2600 limitations produced many variations on this theme, its one of the few of this style that imo can be fun alone, but its really intended for competitiveness.

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Absolutely. The fact that the shark is quite big and can appear on the screen (I don't think it can be half hidden by the edge of the screen) and also turn around instantly, without warning, makes it very difficult to evade and attack. It makes the game feel difficult and almost unfair while playing alone, but even funnier with friends I guess.

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