I can remember the first time I saw the movie Jaws,
because it was the first "R" rated movie I was allowed to see (more
about my folks’ liberal decision making a bit later). In a packed movie
theater in Jersey City on a Saturday afternoon, I watched the classic thriller
unfold, hoping it would never end. The suspense! The horror! A leg floating to
the bottom of the sea! What more could a young boy want? Well, as it turned out,
quite a lot of video games. But Jaws - the movie - certainly held me over for a
long, long, time. I’ve seen the movie dozens of times since that day but I
always think back to my first encounter with the killer shark on the big screen
that Saturday.
While recently playing the Bandai game Jaws for the Nintendo Entertainment System, I felt a similar tug from the past. Yes, this is exactly the way I remember the game. I remember spending days trying to beat it, then taking a completely different approach and whipping it unexpectedly. The game doesn’t attempt to follow the movie script: you spend most of it hiding from the big guy until you’re powerful enough to take him on. You get tougher by traveling from port A to port B, and of course in-between you are attacked by various denizens of the deep. In the game’s climax, you face Jaws mano-a-shark. Not terribly exciting. Maybe I was expecting the original movie, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, and Roy Scheider. What I got instead was the fourth movie, starring the woman who played Roy Scheider’s wife in the original movie.
It’s one of gaming’s strange phenomenons that certain titles can survive the test of time and ultimately be called "classics", while others lose their charm over time. Although Jaws came to us sometime in 1987 the experience was somewhat "fresh" to me at the time. Today, however, it is readily apparent that the game simply combines several proven formulas and slaps a big movie license on top. When I recently dusted it off to play for this review what sprang into my head was "Seaquest meets Air-Sea Battle in the land of Shark! Shark!" (OK, so odd things often spring into my head). I don’t know why I didn’t look at it that way in 1987, maybe it’s because there weren’t all that many "Seaquest meets Air-Sea Battle in the land of Shark! Shark!" games around. Or maybe it’s because this Jaws game was fun to play. Or maybe it’s just the movie license thing, which wasn’t looked down upon as much back then but has a miserable history today. How things have changed.
Compared to other games of its time, Jaws still packs some graphic power. They’re terrific - everything looks like what it’s supposed to, there’s lots of color and just enough animation. There are several different challenges thrown at you - collect sea shells (they’re like money) by harpooning jellyfish, stingrays, and small sharks; get extra shells by scoring on the challenge stage (which plays like an Air-Sea Battle boat stage); chip away at Jaws’ power. The final stage is where you get to impale Jaws with the bow of your ship. The controls are tight, no complaints there either.
The problem I have with this game NOW is that it’s just plain dull. It takes way too long to build up enough power to take on Jaws and by that time you won’t be interested anymore. Every time your diver is killed by a lucky jellyfish your power level goes back to the bottom, which is like starting over. During this long quest you are forced to listen to a terrible droning tune. No option to turn it off. Come to think of it, there are no options for anything at all.
I wouldn’t rate Jaws lower than the ocean’s floor, but it’s definitely sleeping with the fishes in my collection.
