Why I won't be playing Nintendo's latest diving-inspired game

I love the Endless Ocean games.

I'm a diver myself; although the Endless Ocean series cannot replicate the charm and thrill of real diving it does have the same relaxing feel of floating through a hidden world simply for the pleasure of taking a look at what there is to see and exploring secret places.

It's not without it's inaccuracies in terms of the game's approach to the technique of diving; however, with Endless Ocean there appears to be an awareness of some of the detail of the sport: air is consumed more at greater depth, air is also consumed under stressful circumstances and specialised breathing equipment is required for deep dives.

Nintendo have recently released demos for some of their WiiWare releases. I thought I'd take a look at Dive: The Medes Island Secret. It has a similar visual fidelity to Endless Ocean but utilises a fixed side-scrolling camera and is akin to the retro Sinclair Spectrum game, Scuba Dive (pictured).



The game takes as its premise the search for lost gold in a Mediterranean stretch of coast. However this game almost immediately horrified me in its portrayal of the sport and the underwater environment.

You enter the sea armed with a spear gun. Fish or plants that block your path are to be shot; especially fish which "attack" in the game, depicted in the demo as Lionfish - a fish which in nature present little or no aggressive behaviour towards humans. Most injuries are as a result of divers carelessly swimming into their venomous spines.

It's bad enough that careless fishing, reckless or thoughtless divers and large shipping damage the marine life in our seas. To depict a game in which the fish can be targeted and shot with a spear is incomprehensible to me and certainly should not be present in a game based upon the sport of Scuba Diving.


In Endless Ocean, the fish are there to be studied and observed. True, in Endless Ocean 2, the player is provided with a "gun" of sorts which is used to pacify aggressive predators and heal sick fish, but this device is a suitable science-fiction idea it provides little to suggest the fish are to be harmed. In Dive, however, the fish cannot be interacted with at any level beyond shooting - in spite of the in-game shops assertion that the spear is a "tranquiliser" this is clearly a post-production addition as the in-game animation shows fish which have been shot turning upside down and floating to the surface. It is clearly a weapon designed to kill.

The ignorance of the sport does not end there. I was briefly impressed that the game depicted Oxygen Toxicity damaging the player's health when attempted to swim below a 60m depth. However, when I looked in the in-game shop for items the game depicts a "special wetsuit" which must be used for deep dives.

Research is important in any game which depicts real life sports, people or events. Dive: The Medes Island Secret displays a complete ignorance of the sport and a lack of sensitivity to the issues we have created for the marine environment.

I would heartily recommend both Endless Ocean titles for anyone looking for a reasonable replication of the sport of Scuba Diving.

GameCity5 - Day One - Working Lunch and Remakes

Sadly events took a turn for the confusing and frustrating. I arrived at the Tonic venue for a session entitled "Who should save video games?" This was to be a debate around if and how we should preserve gaming's heritage, in the face of changing technology, quickly obsolescent hardware and games makers with neither the time nor the remit to store cultural product for future generations of historians.

However before I could get into the venue I was blocked by door stewards who had a clipboard full of names. It turns out that the session required a sign-up beforehand. There were probably about 10 or 15 of us outside who were a little bemused, as the website had not indicated that any kind of sign-up was required.

This reared its head again at the Braid discussion, although this time I found (much to my bemusement) that I was actually on the sign-up sheet, despite having had no memory of doing so.

It turns out that the 'my event' part of the GameCity website was in fact being used to create attendance lists for the venues. Most users seem to think that this was simply a Web 2.0-style calendar app to help attendees plan their day but it seems it is actually being used to determine numbers. However, people signing up on the website and adding events to a calendar is certainly no guarantee they are actually planning on attending GameCity, let alone a specific event. Surely enough, when only about 20 of the people on the stewards' check-sheet actually turned up for the discussion the rest of the stragglers were let in.

This was a minor flaw in the organisation of what was otherwise a very well co-ordinated day.

Anyway a good discussion was had around the issue of archiving and preserving with an excellent panel:

From left: Jonathan Smith - Travellers' Tales/Time Warner, Tom Woolly - National Media Museum, Spencer Neal - New Statesman, Michael Rawlinson - UKIE

If I'm honest my opinion got a little turned around as a result of the debate. I've always been a strong advocate that games from the past should be emulated on current formats so that the history of gaming is always accessible, in the same way that if I want to watch a film from 1926 there is nothing stopping me, as long as the film has been transferred to a modern format.

However the debate really brought to my mind the fact that gaming has come from such a basic infancy that many of the games we used to play are simply not valid for a modern audience. James, from the National Media Museum, pointed out that what is more interesting is to try and capture the experiences of the players who were there at the time.

This struck a chord with me as I am aware that many old films really mean little to a modern audience without first gaining some knowledge of the context of the film. In the same way my own experiences with "retro" gaming have been mixed. Games I used to play I can re-play with a certain fondness, although I am often surprised at how frustrating the experience is; old games with which I have no nostalgia actually provide very little as a result of playing them myself.

There was a consensus (well, totally majority) in the room that the public purse should be funding an organisation to maintain gaming's cultural history, in the same way that the British Museum legally requires a copy of every published print work to be delivered to them for storage. Having said that, given that the room was populated by either gamers, industry figures and anyone else interested in the subject it's probably not a representative cut of the population, but still...

Problematically, this raises a whole raft of questions around what should be archived and how it should be stored. I did ask the panel whether they though the current generation of games posed more of a problem than older games as so much of today's content requires online activation, patches. And what of World of Warcraft? With so much of the experience based around the user experience of a multi-million player community?

Ultimately more questions posed than answered, I think and certainly this is a topic which requires an article all of its own, so for now I will move on.

After a brief chat with the panel afterwards, including a great chance to chinwag with Jonathan Smith from Travellers' Tales (who I learned was sadly not at the company during its Leander days). Following this session he took up residence in one of the pods and encouraged a couple of gamers to play through the PS2 version of Lego Star Wars II, using it as an opportunity to highlight some differences between how games were made - even 5 years ago - compared to today (I confess I hadn't even noticed that Language-selection screens had disappeared from games!). Really nice to get to spend a bit of time chatting to a thoroughly nice chap from a company that makes decent games. At least I didn't have to be diplomatic about their output...

Following this I headed into the beautifully ornate Council House for a discussion about the re-making of games. With Martin Hollis, creator of the original Goldeneye, on the panel it was inevitable that a certain amount of time was going to be given over to that topic but other things were covered, too. The other members of the panel were Paul Carruthers (creator of Archipeligos on the Amiga!), Rob Fearon from Retro Remakes and Tom Woolley from the National Media Museum.

The most interesting aspect of the discussion, for me at least, was that it gave a real and rare insight into the attachments that game creators feel for their work. In the modern marketplace we expect game producers to view their work as so much product or ephemeral projects. It's refreshing, then, to hear Paul Carruthers describe the experience of discovering that one's own work has been 'remade' without his knowledge as "weird... I felt like I'd been burgled". Tom Hollis agreed and said "if you create something [artistic] you feel you have a right to control it forever and ever".

In spite of all this there was a general feeling that the panel wish re-makers the best of luck with their projects, although they did express that, given the ease of contacting industry figures via the Internet, it is at least polite to contact the originators and ask for permission.

As for the Goldeneye remake, Tom Hollis is only too aware of the mountain to be climbed and the weight of expectation fans and those who have heard the legends surrounding the original will bring to bear. Tom was asked if he had wanted to be involved in the remake: "Actually I've been asked to be involved and it's a tough project - I'm not really up for it!"

All pictures in this post courtesy of GameCity with thanks