EA Goes Fishing

EA Sports recently sent us screenshots of its upcoming fishing game, Championship Bass. Fishing games are surprisingly popular among some gamers, and EA Sports is hoping to appeal to that market with a sports-fishing game that includes a variety of features.

Championship Bass is slated to ship sometime next month, and it will appear on the PC and the PlayStation. It includes three modes of play: bass challenge, fishing trip, and tournament. It also has multiplayer support. The bass challenge is the arcade-style gameplay that ramps up difficulty as you fish through 50 different scenarios. Among the "top bass lakes" you can fish in are Sam Rayburn, Lake Mead, and Lake Toho. The fishing-trip mode is described as "free-form fishing where the player chooses locations and conditions." Tournament mode is simply a competition against AI players. You can also play all modes with human opponents with the game's multiplayer suite.

The game supports several different camera views, as well as difficulty settings. EA Sports also boasts, "the most advanced fish intelligence of any game platform." However, gamers will have to judge that when the game ships. Like Sega's bass-fishing game, you can access hidden lures and hunt an elusive giant bass if you perform particularly well in the game.

Other features include heavily populated underwater environments, more than 200 lures, 25 rods, downloadable lures, lakes, levels, game fish, and secret fishing areas.

The game is being developed by Engineering Animation and is being published by EA Sports. Look for it next month.