So who else loves Sewer Shark then?

[CurlyPaul]

This is one of those marmite games that split people down the middle, so which side are you on?

Personally I love it - the music is fantastic, the gameplay is simple but watching the arrows at the top of the screen and simultaneous shooting stuff makes for some intense gaming and the cut scenes are the best every. Ghost is brilliantly played in ever scene.

Turn and burn baby

[jerry coeurl]

**Paging mrbigreddog to the Sega CD sub-forum

As for myself, I've tried it a couple times, but never made it more than a few minutes before completely wrecking. I need to give it an honest shot one of these days, I suppose, but I just don't think FMV games are for me, for the most part.

[kool kitty89]

It's a decent game, relatively simple, mediocre (acquired taste) FM music, bad/campy (in a fun way) plot/acting. Of course it's using the (virtually) uncompressed FMV format only used on it and Night Trap, though with less noticeable color clash than Night Trap.

I find it reasonably fun, and a lot more playable than Night Trap. Apparently the 3DO version has messed up controls (stiff/laggy), though it does have better video quality. (a shame it never got a PC release or a 32x re-release... or even a MCD re-release taking advantage of the compression schemes available later in the MCD's life)

[SpaceFlea]

I initially loathed it because it was my only Sega CD game for about five months. But after a few years and numerous games later I decided to give it another chance and was quite pleased with it in the end. And I was so very proud of myself when I finally beat it. The cut scenes are awesomely hilarious.

I'm ratagator bait waaaaah!!!

[PHANTOM2040]

OH HELL YEAH!!!

[dbtmellis]

i Think the game play was good, but the FMV just was plain awful.

[PHANTOM2040]

OH HELL NO!!!

[oldskool]

I'm one of those guys that just loves it. Good childhood memory. Enjoyed it then, and I enjoy it now. My only gripe about it is the music. BLEH!

[kool kitty89]

I'm one of those guys that just loves it. Good childhood memory. Enjoyed it then, and I enjoy it now. My only gripe about it is the music. BLEH!

Yeah, I wonder why they didn't stick with the original streaming audio, or at least a direct arrangement of that using the PCM chip (preferably in addition to FM+PSG).
Maybe they needed other streaming data or something else so it couldn't be done as in the cutscenes.

It obviously would have been lower quality streaming audio, but still, a lower quality version of what the 3DO got (presumably the original 1989 soundtrack) would have been nice. Probably another thing that could have been changed with a re-release on the SCD, let alone 32x. (hell, even by 1993 they'd come out with some reasonably capable video compression schemes that could have been applied for rereleases of both Sewer Shark and Night Trap, though that wouldn't have so much to do with audio as video resolution/size -audio compression, if used, would be separate -and there were already some lower performance oriented ADPCM schemes in relatively common use in the late 80s)

[sheath]

I don't love it or hate it. I played the hell out of it when I bought my Sega CD at launch. I didn't like the music or the image quality, but it was novel. I ended up beating it and never playing it again.

I think Load Star is what a "better" Sewer Shark would have been. If Sewer Shark looked and sounded like Load Star I might have gone nutso for FMV. As it was, I spent as much time wondering where those floating pixels came from as I did playing it.

[tz101]

I don't see it as a game that splits people down the middle.

While I don't have great a amounts of hatred for ewer Shark, I like it a little, although it is not in the "loved" status yet.

The game is interesting and fun to play in short quantities, but does not hold my interest for longer periods.

So, I do not hate it, but neither do I love it...

[kool kitty89]

I don't love it or hate it. I played the hell out of it when I bought my Sega CD at launch. I didn't like the music or the image quality, but it was novel. I ended up beating it and never playing it again.

I think Load Star is what a "better" Sewer Shark would have been. If Sewer Shark looked and sounded like Load Star I might have gone nutso for FMV. As it was, I spent as much time wondering where those floating pixels came from as I did playing it.

It's a shame they didn't pull the early versions of FMV off the shelves and re-release them with re-encoded versions. By the time the CD model 2 launched in 1993 they may have already had that ability (custom format compression libraries) and they definitely did early enough to apply it to several 1993 FMV games like Ground Zero Texas.

It wouldn't have looked or sounded as good as the 3DO version, but probably as good as the CD version of Road Rash looked/sounded compared to the 3DO intro.


Sewer Shark does seem to have some pretty significant characteristic trates of its late 80s origin with the scifi style, music, and of course the use of special effects and stop motion visual effects rather than CGI stuff that became dominant in the mid 90s.
The premise/plot/setting in general make it a lot more timeless than Night Trap and seems a good bit less dated for 1992 than Night Trap (granted that was '87 and not '89) and you could argue that the special effects and stop motion animation hold up a good bit better than CGI of that period, but the video quality on the Sega CD version is certainly lacking for that platform, let alone contemporaries. (at least they put a good bit more effort into an optimized codec than Japanese developers had by that point -still using uncompressed frame by frame 16 color video- and that went a lot further with the proper lossy compression schemes expanding on the tile optimized format for 1993 and beyond -a lot better than real cinepak derivative... Rebel Assault shows what a mistake that would have been to use)

[streetsofrage]

it was the only game i had for my sega cd back in the day lol classic game

[oldskool]

I am gonna have to check out the 3DO version if it's got better music and FMV. Hell, that's all that I ever wanted out of Sewar Shark. Other than those things I really liked it a lot.

[CurlyPaul]

I surprised at all the low opinions of the music - I really love it myself