Disaster Report: Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures (Xbox)

The ocean is perhaps the most beautiful and most mysterious place on our planet, as inaccessible as outer space at times but also just a trip to the beach away. It’s what allows our planet to host so much life, and as you dive deeper into it, that life becomes more unusual, more dangerous, and practically alien in how it can function.

 

Around 80% of our oceans are still a mystery to us, the crushing weight of water and gravity making it hard to plunge into those depths… if you’re a human. If you’re the face of a theme park franchise who needs to make for an interesting video game though, that’s a different story. Why not have a killer whale easily swim down to the ocean’s deepest parts to fight off unusual creatures, rediscover Atlantis, and fight Poseidon who just so happens to look a lot like the eldritch god Cthulhu? Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventure probably didn’t expect its young audience to question the absurd quest the titular orca goes on and I’m not totally convinced they expected players to enjoy it either. Very little of the fundamentals of game design seem to be given any degree of thought here, the game not only holding together poorly mechanically but having one of the most baffling approaches to story telling I’ve ever seen.

 

While it’s easy to dive right in and start identifying the issues with Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures, perhaps it’s better we treat this expedition into awfulness with the same care exploring the ocean requires. The ocean can be divided into five distinct layers based on how deep below the surface you are, so as we plumb deeper into the issues with this 2005 Xbox game, let us start by dipping our toes in where its safe before beginning the dangerous trek down into the murky depths of this awful licensed game…

(original image from Seasky.org)

EPIPELAGIC ZONE: SEAWORLD AND SHAMU

At the top layer of the ocean lies the area still basking in the sunlight, the spot humans are most familiar with. It’s where we swim, what our boasts rest atop, and as deep as we can see down into before it becomes a featureless blue expanse. The Epipelagic Zone can be welcoming with its beautiful blues and refreshing waters, but it is by no means safe despite being the public face of the sea.

 

In the same way, the SeaWorld branding is definitely meant to be the inviting lure to drag players down into the depths of Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures. While not everyone may be familiar with the theme park franchise it’s associated with, SeaWorld is a set of aquatic theme parks that mixes together the typical appeals of thrill rides and stage shows with a rare chance to see marine mammals in the flesh. Living much of my life in San Antonio, Texas meant it was a place I went to often with friends and family, and since I’ve always had a big interest in animals and the natural world, the chance to be so close to such creatures was exhilarating. Hand-feeding a dolphin, walking through a pool full of manta rays… my sister even got a chance to enter the penguin enclosure to hold the little birds who would otherwise only be found on the other end of the Earth.

With some of my favorite animals including creatures like seals and walruses, I was pretty much primed to love the park, but no matter which part of SeaWorld most appealed to a patron, everyone knew the face of the park was Shamu. While the exact orca given this name has changed over the years and across SeaWorld’s locations, the enormous killer whales leaping out of the water to perform tricks have dazzled people since the 1960s. Naturally I have some complex emotions about how SeaWorld handles their animals, such thoughts made harder to articulate when SeaWorld is also one of the few major organizations assisting sea life as well, but with the orca shows retiring it does seem like SeaWorld might be on a path to better presenting unforgettable encounters with aquatic life without potentially compromising the welfare of the animals involved in it.

 

This has likely sounded like some form of advertisement for the park, but even if you are familiar with it personally you have to remember there are only four SeaWorld locations, one of which is still under construction in Abu Dhabi, and even if you thought you really knew so much about SeaWorld you probably didn’t realize its name had no space in it until you saw me writing it that way. To be fair, I was writing it with a space until I went to confirm some of my information presented here, so now that we all agree we aren’t SeaWorld experts, we can move on from the primer on this theme park’s existence and start to consider how it ended up a video game.

 

It’s hard to say exactly why Activision thought as a SeaWorld themed game would be a good investment, but if I had to guess, it’s probably that the video game rights to it were inexpensive. SeaWorld itself could potentially sell the game at their park gift shops, and even on store shelves it might rope in kids who have an interest in aquatic life. I admit I played it mostly because I love to see video games that feature aquatic life rather than caring about its SeaWorld branding. I certainly didn’t expect the product to be as atrocious as it turned out to be, and my expectations weren’t even that high coming in. The Endless Ocean games on Wii managed to engross me and their main mechanic is to pet fish repeatedly until you get a textbox of trivia on the species that you’ll no doubt forget right after reading it, so it’s not like I had absurdly lofty standards.

 

Whatever the reasoning behind its existence, Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures has now tainted the Xbox library with its existence, but looking at the cover it does look rather lovely and inviting. It’s hard to make an ocean’s sea life and bright coral look unappealing when going for a natural approach and they even look quite bright and inviting in game, but you might notice a decidedly unrealistic rendition of Shamu on the front of the box. It’s not too surprising they tried to make the killer whale cuter than its real world counterpart. It’s actually rather difficult to see an orca’s eyes in real life and we’re naturally drawn to perceive those big white spots as the eyes instead, giving it a more intimidating look that wouldn’t fly for a kid’s game. Giving it a nice cartoon face was the right decision, and on the box, it looks just fine! In game though…

Rather than looking like a cute twist on the oceanic predator, Shamu looks a bit… stunted. It’s like his body plan from tail up to about his neck was kept in line with the real animal before suddenly someone slapped the head of some rubber toy version of the creature onto the real deal. Rather than the body shape transitioning smoothly into the head’s shape, it now shrinks down to a point rather abruptly, and when in motion, the neck area actually further emphasizes how little it seems part of the body. The fat of what might be called a neck sacrifices the sleek design of the orca so it can move its head around in a way that looks rough and sometimes a little distressing. No moment is that more evident then when you run out of life in Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventure.

 

The life bar in general is a bit hard to track during action, Shamu not always reacting to incoming damage and some enemies able to pile it on since the orca doesn’t really flinch back from most injuries. When you suddenly find yourself without any life left, the world suddenly goes black, Shamu swimming towards the screen just so you can see his panicked expression. My first death I had no clue what was happening since the damage taking wasn’t the clearest and I had wondered if something else prompted Shamu turning to me with clear fear on his face. The sudden presentation of it almost felt like something ripped from a ghost story about a haunted video game, but after making sure the child playing sees Shamu’s terrified expression as he realizes his own mortality, the game throws you back in and has you repeat what you were working on in a game that’s already tedious and slow.

 

It does feel about time to dive deeper into what’s wrong with Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures though, so say goodbye to the sunlight as we dive down into…

MESOPELAGIC ZONE: POSSIBLY THE WORST TOLD STORY IN GAMING

Down where only a fraction of light can even reach, in the area where blobfish and giant squid hid from discovery for centuries, we find one of the game’s first biggest sins, and the subsection’s title may sound hyperbolic, but I’d like to emphasize that it might be the worst TOLD story, not the worst story in gaming.

 

By now I’ve played hundreds upon hundreds of video games all with different approaches to story telling. Some barely have any, choosing to focus on their action or gameplay, and we hardly need a plot to something like virtual chess. Pushing aside the plot is a deliberate decision though, the emphasis on the gameplay and the narrative barely having any purpose besides to perhaps establish stakes. On the other hand, there are certainly games that focus hard on the story and only end up telling a bad one. Even as you uncover some baffling plot detail or experience amateurish writing though, usually the game is a pretty linear narrative with maybe some flashbacks thrown in to establish important details or help uncover a twist.

Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures though takes an extremely unusual approach to its pre-level scenes. Presented as a sequence of screenshots that pop in to eventually form one screen full of comic-book like panels, the scenes start off pretty simple. You’re about to enter a level, so some context on why you’re there and what you might face ahead is nice to have. Rooting the level in the overall narrative is a solid choice as well, and for maybe the first three or so panels, that’s what you get. You might need to solve a mysterious puzzle in the level, or go save your manatee friend Horacio! And then the next panel pops up, saying that Shamu has saved Horacio, or telling you exactly how to solve that puzzle you won’t be seeing until later. Then it tells you about the level’s boss, congratulates you for defeating the boss, and says Shamu moves onto the next level.

 

After all of this has been said, the level starts, the puzzle isn’t solved, Horacio is still captured, and the boss hasn’t been beaten yet. For some reason the game wants to cram in all the details about the before, during, and after of the stage into a scene that comes before you even see what the level looks like. You can skip these segments with a press of the B button if you don’t want the whole level’s events spoiled for you, but these can also contain the only details on how the story is progressing so it’s more a gamble of trying to pick when to skip so you get the framing for what’s ahead without having the puzzles ruined by having their solutions handed over or moments the game plays as surprises already given away because that sudden boss appearance was told to you minutes before their debut. It’s not like the game has a plot you will be beat up over having spoiled for you, it’s mostly just explanations for why an animal from a theme park has to fight the literal god of the ocean, but things get weirder when you consider what happens as the level unfolds.

 

As you actually play through the stage and perform the actions you already know are coming, the game will still have small scenes in the level. When you actually save Horacio that’s a scene, and he tells you about Poseidon’s plans at that moment just like he did in the level’s opening cutscene. It almost seems like the game isn’t aware you know either with how panicked the manatee’s explanation still manages to be despite you having all that information from the premonition-like opener, but things get even odder as the puzzles you had the details fed to you earlier for come back to give you a second helping. When you find the objects later like levers or wheels you need to activate the right way, the game draws your attention to them, sometimes in unskippable scenes, and might even just tell you the right way to use them again just in case you forgot.

 

I understand that maybe Activision and developer Fun Labs might not have high hopes for the attention span of its intended audience, but even children’s programming like Dora the Explorer knows to present its information in a linear fashion, and even when the Teletubbies are showing you the same scene on their stomachs twice they aren’t first telling you what exactly is going to unfold. I have two theories on why this came together the way it did though. One is perhaps more likely, the team who made the level introduction cutscenes not aware fully of how they’d be used or not communicating with the level designers or people who would work on the visuals for how they’d actually be positioned within the game. The other idea might be that they made the panel-like scene presentation without considering how it would be used in game and then placed it in the way that was closest to making sense. Licensed games are often made quickly and on a low budget so it might have been a case where some miscommunication lead to them throwing in what they had while not being too worried about how confusing its story-telling approach would be.

 

Speaking of that story, I’ve obliquely referred to some of its bigger plot points, but before we dive deeper it’s important we get some of the key details on why Shamu isn’t just sitting in a big water tank for his video game adventure. Well, that’s because the kraken attacked SeaWorld with the express purpose of kidnapping the aquatic life to turn into slaves of Poseidon of course!

Horacio is the only one we ever see or hear mentioned though, the manatee practically Shamu’s wise old mentor who will commentate over the entire game. He explains new mechanics, constantly praises you for picking up items you’ve picked up many times before, and always makes sure to say “poison” in a foreboding voice whenever poison briefly bothers Shamu. Horacio is the narrator of the cutscenes too, and the game actually starts with a rather poor tutorial where he first explains all of the game’s basic controls and actions, introduces all of the relevant items, and then once the long cutscene explaining it all is done, you do those actions as he talks about them again. The more dynamic tutorial is a fine enough way to introduce things, but having the drawn out exposition and then the more natural sequence of experiencing them first hand feels pointless on top of hard to pay attention to even for me, a player who was willing to sit through a half hour of pinball tutorials for Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball.

 

As for why Poseidon wants to enslave SeaWorld’s aquatic creatures, he hopes to pull Atlantis up from the sea floor to make a competing theme park! The whole “enslaving the animals” angle is introduced after what Horacio deems to be the more pressing matter of SeaWorld having competition, and Shamu’s duty seems first and foremost to engage in some anti-competitive practices and deny the world a chance to experience the lost city of Atlantis and its many technological wonders. Once you do defeat the Kraken and face down Poseidon though, you will be able to finally put on a show at SeaWorld to a stadium full of empty seats. It seems someone is piping in applause to convince you your aerial acrobatics are wowing someone though, but the timed button presses required to pull off the maneuvers often leads to Shamu sometimes just flailing around in the air as the orca can’t fluidly transition between the tricks in the short span of time it remains airborne.

(Gif made from Gamecube version which, rest assured, is no better than the Xbox one)

Before the credits roll though, enjoy your victory as you look out at the ocean where a tepid fireworks show bursts out of the water’s surface, the mild popping of plain fireworks allowing you to shift your camera angle on it as if there was something to see by getting a different perspective on it. Even if the plot had been told in a more coherent manner, Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures would certainly still feel unusual and underwhelming in equal measure, the grand quest to take down a Greek god linked to surprisingly mundane capitalistic concerns and unsatisfying conclusions.

 

Much of your time will be spent playing Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures instead of scratching your head at its plot’s presentation though, so we must continue going deeper down into the now dark waters to find…

BATHYPELAGIC ZONE: A WORLD UNFIT FOR ITS HERO

Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventure is an action game focused mostly on levels with a start and end point and a few little goals in the middle like grabbing the right items or solving puzzles that the game doesn’t want you to ever have to think much about. It’s a fairly standard idea for a game of this type, but we do have one thing to consider: our playable character is a sea animal with no hands to grab anything with.

 

Underwater levels and entire games that take place underwater have found ways around this before and since. The Ecco series manages to make its dolphin hero a nice fit for their worlds, games with open 3D environments like Maneater give the shark protagonist a lot of room to move around and fight in, and series like The Legendary Starfy manage to apply platform game design concepts to stages that allow for the freedom of movement that swimming brings to the table. Of course, all three of these games are dealing with heroes much smaller than a killer whale, orcas already being the largest dolphin species on Earth despite often being referred to as whales. With such a big playable character you not only need to devote a lot of the screen to that big beefy beast, but it’s not going to have an easy time realistically turning if it needs to face a different direction. Challenging its movement becomes harder because it needs more room to perform simple adjustments, enemies often can’t be too big themselves for fear of crowding the screen but if they’re too little they might be easy to miss both visually and in terms of attack options.

There are many considerations on how to design a world to challenge such a protagonist, but the team behind Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures didn’t seem to consider them much. Many of the game’s levels are locked into a 2D presentation style, making them essentially sidescrollers that you need to swim your big blubbery creature through. The game doesn’t seem to think much of having tons of rocky walls squeeze in and give Shamu little room to maneuver, and while passing through a tight tunnel on its own isn’t difficult, the game will slap enemies down in this tunnel to practically guarantee you will scrape up against them and take some hits. When the game does have a larger open area Shamu can swim around in without worrying about being sliced apart by enemies he can’t really hit due to their positioning, there’s not too much to do. The game will scatter its many collectibles about in large empty expanses of water, and while you can tilt the right control stick to sort of peek around the area some to try and spot them, they also don’t load in until they’re close enough to the player, making it hard to truly inspect these areas. If you want the Kraken Krystals that go towards unlocking new moves- sorry, “animal behaviors” as Horacio constantly refers to them, you’ll need to swim about these empty spaces up and down to sweep up what’s around. There might be an enemy there to lightly avoid, making it a little less appealing to try and sweep up the items, but it does feel like Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures can’t nail either enclosed or open spaces because it can’t decide how to fill them properly.

 

I will grant the game one thing, the postcards that you somehow collect deep underwater are a nice collectible, and the relics and crystals do add to your points so you can buy some videos and postcards if you missed them during the adventure. These videos and images are of the actual SeaWorld theme parks, heavy focus given to the animals in them, and getting to see dolphins, penguins, and other animals simply hanging out or interacting with people is nice. After all, they made a whole theme park around that concept, so having some videos with a small slice of that does feel like a reasonable collectible despite actually grabbing collectibles leading to the action slowing down in a game that already struggles to inject life into its action.

 

The enemies in Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventure are mostly either other aquatic life or little contraptions and armored animals that serve Atlantis and Poseidon. However, despite being a “killer” whale, it seems like SeaWorld wasn’t too keen on showing Shamu kill anything but the krill he eats to heal, although why they’re the ones okay to kill when they’re the only creature besides Shamu to get a cartoon face is certainly odd. The animals who want to hurt Shamu often can’t be outright beaten, the player instead smacking them with Shamu’s tail to send them flying off. The first time you see them move towards the screen after being slapped can be a little neat, but they’ll eventually swim back to where they were before to be a nuisance again. Crabs can pinch at you if you get near the bottom of a cramped area, but keep in mind the enemy crabs are different from the crabs who hold signs telling you which way to go since level designs are often generic and confusing without arrows to point you onwards. Electric eels swirl around in tunnels you need to get through and will pretty easily zap you even if you go for an attack, urchins move back and forth and can release poison, and mostly even something like a pufferfish or an octopus with an actual sword and shield present the same threat of being something damaging in the path of your big dolphin.

If you want to hit something with your tail in your most basic attack, lining it up isn’t always perfect. The game seems to account for 3D space despite locking you to 2D movement, so sometimes if Shamu’s body can’t conceivably swing that fluke around to smack an animal away, it just won’t work. If this animal is perhaps in a tight space blocking access to the way onward or some collectible you’ll have to finagle your killer whale around to get the tail swipe right, but remember it returns in a few seconds so if you need to go back through you might have to fiddle with this again! You do have some other basic attacks, one being a sonar that can stun enemies so they at least won’t attack you while you’re trying to actually hit them, although this doesn’t work on everything and sometimes just plain out doesn’t want to work, perhaps because of distance calculations or the enemy type but this is one detail Horacio won’t overexplain sadly.

 

Health pick-ups reappear after a while so you can grab them again if you’re getting bullied a bit too much, and since Shamu is a mammal you’ll need to grab oxygen although that’s rarely a worry, but if you just want to ignore most of the game’s danger you can use Shamu’s unusual ability to wrap themselves in a protective bubble for a bit. You do have a limited amount of uses of your “animal behaviors” tied to how many health pick-ups you grab and how much you avoid damage, but this bubble is free to use and, while you can’t do much else but move while in it, it protects from most forms of damage. Areas become far less interactive then they already are if you just want to bubble and blitz through them. Unsurprisingly, the speedruns I did find of this game have this “get out of damage free” bubble active almost any time it could be, and while having such a defense may seem like it invalidates some complaints about tight quarters and pesky enemy placement, if something leads to less engagement with a level’s design or its enemies, it’s often a band-aid to bad construction rather than an interesting way to navigate the world.

 

We still have a few level types to address here though, since the 2D levels only make up most of the game’s design. Admittedly they do often feel much longer than they truly are, especially if you want to grab collectables or don’t just bubble your way through, but the normal stages do sometimes at least shift around in their emphasis like one level having you navigate the mazelike streets of Atlantis, another having one large circular loop tied to a treasure hunt, and others throwing in more levers and puzzle elements to open the way forward. There is even a recurring puzzle type where you rotate different parts of a circular panel to guide water to the middle, something that does gradually get more difficult even though the game leans on it way too hard as a way of blocking progress momentarily. The two other level types featured multiple times during the adventure though are almost always the same every time they crop up and the game doesn’t even try to vary them besides ever so slightly cranking up the difficulty.

The first stage type that surprisingly appears at least three times, two of them happening near the start with a single short level between them, are the Kraken chases. Shamu needs to outswim the Kraken in these, but luckily the game handles all of the forward movement. As Shamu swims towards the screen you have a good look at the big squid pursuing him, it lashing out with its tentacles periodically to try and hurt you. Technically you’re meant to try and dodge these, but these levels also have Kraken Krystals to collect, and to tell you when they’re coming, an arrow appears on screen so you can swim over to them. That arrow will almost always tell you a completely safe place to be when the Kraken attacks, and the few times it still might smack you aren’t enough to wear down your life to the point you’d lose the level.

 

These arrows do remind me of the old FMV game Road Avenger where arrows appear on screen and you need to press them to avoid dying, but at least with those it’s a test of reaction times and the arrows add a light layer of interactivity over a game trying to impress with its animated scenes. The multiple levels with this Kraken chase format tell you where it’s safe, give you a bit to get there, and then you don’t really need to move until the next arrow appears. The time to move does get a little tighter in the harder versions of this level, but if you manage to get far enough in this game to get to it, you either are more than capable enough to move slightly around a screen or bubbled your way there and probably could use a touch of difficulty. The normal levels are already perhaps too rough with the player in terms of damage and hazards to keep kids on board unless they keen to the bubble trick though, so by the time Kraken chases are mildly difficult, they’re practically a break from a game that likes to push your big orca around.

 

The other level type that appears is similar in concept, these instead having the player chase down some armored fish to try and rescue Horacio the manatee. You won’t ever save him, and I’m not sure you can ever fail these by falling too far behind since there were times I couldn’t even see the fish anymore, but these have you swimming away from the screen now instead of towards it. Every now and then the fish in the school will have a few members break off to attack you and they’re a real danger since attacking in this level type is even more imprecise than usual and you’ll probably get hurt even when you do hit one, but that’s not what makes these levels perhaps the worst of the bunch.

In the Kraken chase stages you move forward automatically and only control your positioning to dodge those tentacles. In the fish chases, you don’t actually control your ability to move forward per se. If you press nothing, Shamu will just float in place, so you might consider holding forward to make him swim towards the fleeing fish… but that moves you upwards. Any direction you press will only move your positioning in the same manner as the Kraken chase, the player essentially locked into 2D movement but still needing to move forward in 3D space. The way you do this though is an unusual approach to be sure: by moving around in the two-dimensional manner available to you, Shamu will also decide to move forward some on their own. The best way to keep moving is thus to constantly keep flitting around the screen so Shamu doesn’t come to a halt, and while items and enemies are meant to keep you moving and not noticing this is what’s propelling you forward, there are quieter moments where you’ll need to move your killer whale around the screen for the express purpose of just keeping it from coming to a stop.

 

Almost like utilizing a hand crank to keep power in a device, you must keep Shamu in constant motion or you’ll slow down and lose the fish group ahead, although these levels seem to complete just once you’ve reached a certain point anyway. You still need to make sure you get there by keeping Shamu active though, making a level concept that already wasn’t that hot even more tiresome as you can’t even relax during the small breaks from fish assaults.

 

These odd way of moving forward isn’t even the game’s controls at their worst, so join me as we go to see the most abysmal part of Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures…

ABYSSOPELAGIC ZONE: CONTROLLING SHAMU

One of the fundamental elements of creating even a serviceable video game is having all the necessary actions accessible to the player. You press a button, you expect the associated action to happen on screen. It’s almost the bare minimum you need to get right to ensure a game even approaches being tolerable.

 

Thankfully, Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures isn’t the kind of game where the controls outright don’t work. We saw already some moments where it didn’t quite work out as intended, moving forward in the fish chases is controlled in a ridiculous and annoying manner and sometimes your attacks don’t quite work based on quirks of the enemy placement and whale’s cumbersome body shape, but it’s all functional if we’re going by the dictionary definition of the word. You do perform the actions, even if they’re not communicated properly or aren’t working for some other reason. This is a game with functional button presses… mostly.

 

Those animal behaviors mentioned earlier? Shamu’s more interesting and outright supernatural moves are tied to button combos. As you unlock them, the game gives you an onscreen button combo you conceivably are meant to press to activate the power. This can be something as simple as a more vigorous attack that hits multiple times or as outlandish as firing ice from your face or warping around, which is one reason I balk at calling these animal behaviors since even mythical creatures aren’t packing the same list of powers as Shamu. Even early on you get the power to call in a school of fish by sonar to attack an enemy, but the button combo on screen doesn’t seem to really work that well. It will tell you something like “L+Y, B” which doesn’t explain the timing needed to swap between the L+Y combo to B to actually have the move activate, but if you simply press a single button combo like L+B it still might not activate. Does it mean press L then Y, but why would it indicate it that way if you were meant to press B after in a different version of the attack combo? Some moves like calling in the fish worked with decent regularity but other times weren’t working on command, and having overlap with other moves that require the same button input plus a few more means you sometimes execute the wrong attack entirely.

 

During most of the regular gameplay you won’t need these special animal behaviors, but the bosses are practically designed around them. Whether it’s a big pufferfish, big octopus, or, shock of shocks, a big viperfish, the best way to damage them and not get damaged yourself is doing the attack the game suggests on screen over and over during the fight. However, shooting the ice blast at the big octopus might not always work, you might get hit so you’re now facing away and need to reposition your big body to even be looking in the right direction to fire it, and if you take too much damage, you need to go chomp down on some krill so you even have the energy to try the animal behavior again. If it misses that’s another drain on your power, and sometimes it hits but doesn’t seem to do much. Some bosses can be brute-forced it seems, even the final boss fight with Poseidon that tries to get you to do this big dramatic finish of using your behaviors one after the other eventually just ending eventually even if you struggle to activate them. These attacks meant to spice up your repertoire or give you new attack options are thus not reliable enough to integrate into regular play, and they don’t even work properly when it’s boss time even if you keep mashing the required buttons in different ways.

Watching some footage of the Gamecube version (pictured here) it seems to work a little better but the PlayStation 2 version seems to have similar issues. Whatever the reasoning behind this issue, it’s just another reason all the combat is tiresome or annoying to participate in and another reason just to bubble through what you can. Bosses must be taken down though, so expect those control struggles even if you try to slip through most of the bad content elsewhere. Funnily enough though, the one boss fight that can be just handled with tail fluke slaps is the final showdown with the Kraken, and it’s perhaps the worst boss fight. Its tentacles are all hanging down vertically, the player needing to swim up to each one, smack the suction cup that is red, missing when you try to hit it twice pretty much no matter how long you wait, and getting stuck in a little poison cloud that slows you down so as you try to reposition to hit the suction cup again properly it won’t work. Taking down each tentacle gradually is a gruelingly slow process with no danger deep enough to make it a tense battle, especially since you can always just swim off and grab health easily between hits if you need it.

 

Technically I did consolidate other control woes into their relevant sections earlier to make for a cleaner reading experience so we won’t spend too long down in the abyss that is made up of unresponsive button combos and odd control decisions, but this is not the part where we swim up for our first gulp of air after nearly drowning in this game’s awful approach to story, level, and gameplay design. No, there is one layer lower to the ocean, and this is where everything drifts down, a chance to truly look at all the awful waste this game has made…

HADOPELAGIC ZONE: THE CONCLUSION

Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures may have the bright and inviting appeals of an undersea world to draw players in, but once you enter those waters, you’ll find a deeply flawed attempt to make an aquatic adventure. Levels are barely designed to accommodate the orca protagonist’s size and capabilities, some moments asking for actions that don’t always work or button combos that don’t always register. Annoying enemy placement and tight quarters require constant use of the boring bubble shield but open areas are so empty they’re unengaging. Special levels like the Kraken chase are repeated too often despite being mindless affairs and the fish chase variation has you move in an incredibly odd manner. Top this all off with an unusually told story where you hear about what happens during and after a level before even starting it and Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures is a confused experience that doesn’t know how to handle its plot, protagonist, or environment and the player themselves will be struggling to make it work as well.

 

Sure, it can be nice to see some of those video clips of performing animals or aquatic life simply living its life, but why would you want to slog through this SeaWorld video game when you could potentially see a well crafted nature show for that, or even just visit SeaWorld instead? If the branding brought you in you might have already been a fan of the parks and it doesn’t capture anything from them besides its endgame performance to an empty stadium, and kids who are a fan of aquatic life will probably find the confusing game design choices and difficulty off-putting compared to games focused on interacting with animals like the earlier mentioned Endless Ocean series. The oddly-proportioned killer whale at the heart of this doesn’t feel like a powerful beast or a majestic animal, their movements often feeling sloppy and rough or in direct opposition to the world they need to navigate. This same creature that can leap out of the water for multiple flips can’t smack a crab that’s a right in front of them sometimes, and the weird supernatural powers they are given are even harder to call in to the point they’re not going to be available for casual use and make the otherwise very straightforward boss battles needlessly frustrating as you try to make them work.

 

Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures’s weirdest part will always be how it chose to tell its story though. Even games that adapt films will sometimes depend on outside knowledge or cram a lot of details into a scene before the stage to try and shove important plot information in, but they usually try to space it so you’re not being told about future events or already being notified that you’ll be beating the boss and saving your friends before you started the stage you’re going to do so in. Admittedly we all know that Shamu’s going to save the day in this kids game from 2005 based on a theme park franchise, but the way it tells the story really seems to embody the whirlpool of conflicting ideas that were thrown in without making them gel properly. Shamu controls poorly, struggles to interact with the game world that should have accounted for the one character who would be moving through it, and the tale being told is a sloppy chronological mess.

 

Down here in the deepest trenches of the ocean is where a game like Shamu’s Deep Sea Adventures deserves to be, away from where humans have to worry about it and where maybe some enterprising aquatic critter might at least be able to make a home out of the game box. I’m not saying we should dump all copies in the ocean like when the E.T. Atari cartridges were buried under the desert, this game already harms enough terrestrial life with its awful design that it doesn’t need to pollute the ocean too, but the less this game sees the light of day, the better off gamers, fans of SeaWorld, and lovers of aquatic life will be.