DAY 37 / GAME 37 Sewer Shark

DAY 37 / GAME 37

Sewer Shark

How could you not buy that?

           This was bound to come up eventually.  Say what you will about the short-lived genre of live action video based games, they certainly seemed like the future at the time.  I remember watching a news report on tv about the behind the scenes process of filming for a video game.  It seemed pretty neat and it really felt like the next logical step for gaming to me; then again, I was about 12 at the time.

            My brother bought Sewer Shark, of course.  He always bought the weirdest games simply from the look of the back cover.  It was a game for the Sega CD where (for those of you who haven't played it) you are hired to fly through the sewers are wipe out infestations for some rich fat dude.  It was super over-the-top with ridiculous B-movie acting and story.  It's like Top Gun in the sewers.  Everyone's got a call-sign.  Your copilot gets 'Ghost' and you're stuck with 'Dogmeat'.  At the start of each little section, he calls out 4 turns in succession and when they come up you have to steer at them or risk a crashing and a fiery death.  All the while you have to shoot vermin off the walls of the sewer using slow d-pad controls.  
            But here's the best part.  This game was ok, and it would have got it's little bit of play time.  But when we played this game in front of my dad during our weekend at his place, he got hooked.  It was one of those things that just digs at you, like when I play Surgeon Simulator, where you just HAVE to beat it because you're soo close.  It was your reflexes that failed, or your method, or something you'd better shape up this time around before the level loads again because this game isn't going to beat you, is it?
           So my dad tried everything.  This really was his game now.  He even got us to help him by writing down the pace notes and firing them back as the turns came up.  Eventually we had to pack it up and go back home but he had convinced us to leave the system with him.  He had a week off work, or called in sick I'm not sure and spent the week hammering this game until he had done the impossible.  He beat it.  We didn't believe him when he told us.  Regaling some fiction about how you all end up at this beach in Solar City or whatever and you all dump a cooler  of ice and water on your fat boss.  It sounded pretty made up.  It wasn't until very recently that I had thought, now with the power of the internet, to look up the ending to see if he was telling the truth or not.  Turns out, he may be one of the only people on the planet that beat that game.   

                It's funny, because games like this, with their ridiculous b-movie acting are probably lost to the ages.  And yet, if someone came up with something like this that was technically up to date, I think there'd definitely be a market for it.  My dad can't be the only one.