Sewer Shark

Infobox VG| title = Sewer Shark


developer = Digital Pictures
publisher = Sony Imagesoft
designer =
engine =
released = vgrelease|United States of America|USA|October 15, 1992
vgrelease|PAL Region|PAL|1993
genre = FMV rail shooter
modes = SP only
ratings = BBFC: PG
VRC: MA-13
platforms = Sega CD, 3DO
media = 1 CD-ROM
requirements =
input =

"Sewer Shark" is a first-person rail shooter game, the first video game for a game console to use full-motion video for its primary gameplay. It was originally slated to be the flagship product in Hasbro's NEMO video game system, which would use VHS tapes as its medium. However, Hasbro cancelled the NEMO, and Digital Pictures later picked up the game for the Sega CD system. "Sewer Shark" was one of the first games to come out for the Sega CD - shortly after its release in 1992, Sega began to include a copy of this game with each Sega CD unit, making it one of the most widespread games for the system. It was later ported and released for the 3DO in 1994.

Plot

"Sewer Shark" takes place sometime in the future. The player is a rookie pilot in a band of "sewer jockies", whose job is to travel through a vast network of underground sewers to exterminate various dangerous mutated creatures to keep the sewers clean of contaminants for the resort area of "Solar City", an island paradise ruled by the evil Commissioner Stenchler (Robert Costanzo). The player's co-pilot, Ghost (David Underwood), evaluates the player's performance throughout the game, while a small robot named Catfish scouts ahead and gives directions. Your quest is later assisted by Falco, a female jockey who believes that there is a hidden route to the surface, but her snooping angers Stenchler and she is captured. The eventual goal of the game is to reach Solar City by blasting enough creatures to make it through the tubes, following a "crazy looking thing" who guides you in the later missions.

Gameplay

As in other rail shooters, for the most part the ship flies itself, leaving the player to move the crosshairs on the screen and shoot ratigators, bats, scorpions and moles as they appear. Along the way, Catfish will give a series of coordinates (3, 6, 9, or 12) that the player must follow, under the risk of making a wrong turn and crashing into a wall. Shortly after receiving directions, the player will come across a series of turns - in the Sega CD version, by pressing 'B' and moving the D-Pad in the desired direction as the corresponding turn appears. Interspersed throughout the sewers are recharge stations - a light on the ceiling will indicate to the player which direction to turn to replenish the ship's energy. In later levels, the ship will occasionally pass through high concentrations of hydrogen which the player must have Catfish detonate.

Every now and then, Commissioner Stenchler (who is notably always eating, even when surfing) will check in on the player and give his own evaluation of the players' progress. His comments will depend entirely on the performance in the tunnels - the more ratigators the player kills, the better their rating will be, eventually prompting for a call sign change and a promotion ("A clean sewer is a happy sewer!"). As the player gains Ghost's trust, the extent of Stenchler's evil will become more and more apparent, until he's actively trying to kill the player.

Production

While properly classified as a rail shooter, "Sewer Shark" can also be considered an interactive movie through its use of full-motion video to convey the action. Like the actions in "Dragon's Lair", the turns are simply gates the player must pass through to continue playing, and thus the gameplay is almost entirely linear, as in a non-interactive movie.

At the time of its production, game developers were just beginning to realize the potential of CD-ROM technology to bring richer game experiences to the market. And while the Turbografx-16 was the first video game console to include a CD-ROM drive, the Sega CD was the first console to bring CD-ROM games into the mainstream.

While quite powerful for their time, the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis console and the Sega CD add-on module were limited in their capabilities. Because the CD-ROM drive was only capable of streaming at single-speed (150 KB per second) and the Genesis could only display 64 colors simultaneously out of a palette of 512 colors total, a game that displayed full-motion video was a major challenge. Digital Pictures programmers wrote a custom video codec that worked similarly to the later MPEG standard. This codec was used to compress high-quality video at 60 frames per second into chunks of data that were small enough to support up to four simultaneous video streams while staying within the console's limitations. The video quality is very poor by today's standards, but at the time, this was a major technological breakthrough.

External links

* [http://www.segacd.org/expression/site_3/segabase/CD/CD-SewerShark.html "Sewer Shark" at SegaBase]
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* " [http://www.mobygames.com/game/sewer-shark Sewer Shark] " at MobyGames
* [http://www.spoonyexperiment.com/games/SewerShark/ "Sewer Shark Review by Noah Antwiler" at SpoonyExperiment.com]