CTIA 2005: Jaws 3D Hands-On

SAN FRANCISCO--Thirty years after its release, Jaws is still a relevant franchise--a tribute to both the movie and the staying power of killer sharks. In Jaws 3D, you play a budding adventurer in one of three difficulty levels, guppy, barracuda, and great white. Following the events indicated in the daily Amity Gazette, you must go out and hunt sharks, until leveling yourself up enough to take on Jaws himself.

In the game, you deal with characters from film, and at the beginning we were immediately sent to go talk to Quint to get an idea of where to go shark-hunting. This is all done via menus but still manages to give you the feel of the movie--using fairly accurate character portraits, for example. The game's money, or credits, are earned by trapping sharks of different sizes; the larger the shark, the more money it's worth. After speaking with Quint, we were sent to the Western Shoals to find our first hunting grounds. You navigate a boat between different hunting grounds, using a top-down view of the island and surrounding waters, but there's not much to this mechanic, other than moving the directional buttons until you've found the spot you were told to look for. Once there, you're immediately placed inside a diving cage in the depths of the water. You use the directional buttons to look around 360 degrees of the cage, as well as up and down. Sharks will inevitably patrol the area, but generally they'll be too far away to attack you. Instead--as it seems it should be--you have to wait for them to come after you. From time to time, a shark will notice you and beeline for the cage. Even though you're inside the cage, if the shark gets to you, he will do you damage. The goal is to whip around and shoot the shark before it reaches you. Smaller sharks will die with one hit, and upon dying they are immediately counted as caught, but larger ones will take several hits before succumbing to your spears.

The money you get from capturing sharks can be used to either upgrade your spears--to tranquilizer, barbed, or explosive--or to get you better equipment, such as the shark sonar, which indicates where the next attack is coming from. Money can also be used to bribe Quint into revealing bigger and better hunting grounds. Although you spend the money on various items and quests, the total money that you've tallied will accrue for your score, which can be uploaded to a worldwide leaderboard. From what we saw, Jaws 3D is coming along nicely, and we look forward to seeing more of it as it nears its release in Q4 of this year.