Gone Fishing

Bob Colayco is still prowling the shoreline in Animal Crossing: Wild World, looking for a coelacanth. Email him at bob@gamespot.com if you're a fishing addict, too.

To me, a next-gen shooter would model everything inside a city, including all the buildings. That would really create a sense of "being there." Sure, it might not result in balanced levels, but someone once noted that you don't find battlefields, but rather, battlefields find you. Dealing with tactical nightmares is part of what combat is all about. And yeah, it would be a nightmare to create, but no one ever said that the next gen was going to be easy.

But developers don't always need to tear their hair out trying to add more, more, more in modeling reality. Often, the closer games get to being entirely like real life, the less they feel like games and the more they feel like a tech demo that isn't balanced, directed, or fun. At some point we're just going to have the holodeck. That's not necessarily what you want from a game. Some of us just prefer simpler pleasures. Let's take silly fishing minigames as an example.

It's a strange thing, because I hate fishing in real life, and I'm absolutely terrible at it. But I'm inexorably drawn to fishing in video games. The first time I saw The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for example, I played it for hours on end--but not for the great adventure, amazing graphics, and the innovative lock-on targeting.

I sat at the fishing pond and just kept catching fish over and over again. I still never really finished that game, which I'm sure many of you will consider heresy. You see, when I finally caught a 20-pound fish, I decided I'd "beaten" the game.

Then Animal Crossing for the GameCube came along, which not only appealed to my fishing-game sensibility, but also my obsessive-compulsive collecting tendencies.

For those of you who have never played Animal Crossing, the town you live in includes a museum with an aquarium. It's up to you to fill that aquarium with one of each of the game's dozens of fish species. Some fish are only available in certain seasons, while others only come up under certain weather conditions.

I'd long scoffed at the Game Boy Advance-to-GameCube connectivity feature, but upon learning that connecting a GBA to the game would unlock a special island with bountiful quantities of exotic fish...you can bet that I immediately ran to the store to pick up a GBA-to-GC cable. I must have spent months trying to find all the different fish species. They may not have been Pokemon, but I still had to catch them all.

Then there was fishing in World of Warcraft. It wasn't as satisfyingly tactile as fishing in Ocarina of Time or Animal Crossing, but the fish you catch in the game can serve as useful ingredients for cooking or alchemy recipes. At one point during beta testing, it was even possible to fish in treasure chests with good loot. They had to get rid of that feature because people started writing fishing bots for the game, but it was still pretty fun to enter a new area of Azeroth, find a body of water, and cast a line in to see what kind of fish you could catch.

So what is it about fishing in video games that's so appealing? It's probably a lot of the same reasons that people like fishing in real life. It's very relaxing to watch your line and bobber and wait for a bite. Repetitively casting and recasting your line can be almost hypnotic in its monotony. I think the main thing is that fishing minigames are just simple fun. I have no desire to play actual fishing video games, in which you have to worry about esoteric details like the type of bait you're using, the clarity and temperature of the water, the lunar cycle, and fish-finding sonar. I just want to catch fish. So, hopefully, as developers think of ways to harness the power of next-gen platforms to create crazy destructible environments, ultrasweaty perspiration technology, and whatnot, they won't lose sight of the simpler things that make games fun.

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