Genre: Simulation
Publisher: Majesco Entertainment
Developer: Big Fish Games
Release Date: October 16, 2007

A few years ago, the digital pet craze was sweeping America after taking Japan by storm.  Tamagotchi devices were filling the pockets of school kids and distracting just about everybody in the course of their daily lives.  Then, just as quickly as they appeared, they faded from popularity.  All of those little chirping, pixelated monsters were left in dressers and desk drawers to quietly die. 

But then Shigeru Miyamoto, "Mr. Nintendo," got a dog and decided to share the joy of pets with the world all over again.  Nintendogs was released on the Nintendo DS, and the realm of handheld gaming was forever changed.  Every month, gamers are treated to new games about horse grooming, "catz," babies and now even fish, one of the least interesting animals on the face of the planet.

It's no wonder that Fish Tycoon is about the most lackluster game to come out of this craze, and assuming no one ever makes Amazing Sloth Adventures or Grass Growing eXtreme, it'll probably stay that way.  Not only does Fish Tycoon suffer from poor controls and sloppy graphics, but it also manages to not inform you on how to keep your fish from committing suicide upon birth.  It's a confusing game with no depth or fun factor, one that really should be avoided at all costs.  What it boils down to is a portable burden.

But what exactly do you do in Fish Tycoon?  About what you'd expect, it turns out.  You're tending to fish and occasionally sitting in a shop while waiting for people to buy them.  If you really want, you can stare at the fish for a while in screensaver mode, a relic from the game's history on computers.  People who remember Seaman on the Sega Dreamcast may have an inkling of what's in store for them, except this game lacks the joy of nearly human interaction that made Seaman a cult classic.  It's literally just about feeding, maintaining and breeding fish repeatedly, forever and ever.

You start out with a tankful of fish eggs, which quickly hatch a group of six or seven random fishies, including the first of seven "magic fish."  These fish are actually your ultimate goal in this game, but you won't be seeing another one for a good long time.  You see, as the game explains in its opening tutorial text, you're trying to repopulate the magical island of Isola, which we can assume was destroyed by the meddling of man, as usual.  Instead of raising awareness about this tragedy through public service announcements or lectures on the evils of overfishing, the player character has taken on the task of single-handedly repopulating the island with its magical fish.

Apparently the best way to do this is by dropping a bunch of random fish into a tank, making them mate, and selling the reject fish to fund further atrocious experiments in fish husbandry.  Players will find that most of their random mutts will decline in health for no apparent reason and die well before they reach adulthood, so the game boils down to breeding steady, reliable fish to sell off to a needy audience so you can improve your tank and the quality of life for your fish.  Only then do your more exotic mixes stand a slim chance of survival past the first hour of life.

Accomplishing this should be a cinch with the power of the DS' two screens and stylus, but sadly, Fish Tycoon does not even manage those properly.  Thanks to the dimensions of the tank and the large rock sitting in the center, your flat and uninteresting fish aren't even visible half of the time.  This makes it difficult to seek out and grab them so you can check in on them.  Holding the fish is the only way to measure their hunger and health, and slipping them into the isolation tank with a slide of the stylus is the only way to get them to mate.  More than once, the wiggly little guys will more than likely escape your stylus as you desperately stab after them.  Sometimes you'll be chasing one and randomly grab another one that was apparently sitting behind a rock all along.  Then you'll get to watch all of them swim around in senseless terror for a few seconds before their memory is wiped clean with the passing of a few seconds.

It feels the like the dual screens had a lot of potential for this PC/Mac port, but it's sadly ignored.  Sure, it frees the screen from some clutter when you're grabbing your fish, but the tank feels so small confined on that one screen.  The DS apparently is too small to display the whole tank at once the way it is, leaving you desperately dragging around the screen in an attempt to see all of your fish at once.

Just like the original digital pets, Fish Tycoon runs in real time, which means that you'll have to check in throughout the day (or every day, if you slow down the game to half-speed) to feed and nurture your watery friends.  You'll also have to pick out any of the dead younglings from the water and sell any fish that you don't think you need any more.  If you do things right, you'll eventually have a tank of easily produced aquatic creatures constantly breeding and being sold, and then one day, you can focus on discovering some of the other 749 possible species.  I can't emphasize enough that that's all there is to do.

It would still be a nice distraction if the graphics were up to par, but the game skimped as much here as it did in the gameplay department.  The fish seem to be poorly animated 2-D models floating back and forth in a 3-D tank with 2-D scenery.  They clip right through any objects you place as if they weren't there, and they don't even have an eating or birthing animation.  The baby fish are just shrunken versions of the adult fish sprites, and the "shop" animation, which you'll be staring at blankly when you wait around for your fish to sell, is just as poor.  The environments and human characters look like they were hand-drawn by a child, and the audio sounds like it was put together on a 10-year-old synth program.

Overall, Fish Tycoon cannot escape the trappings of mediocrity.  Besides its unique status as a game that requires tedious work for minimum payoff, it also features some of the worst DS compatibility to be seen on the system.  Its bad graphics and lazy programming just seal the deal.  This is a game you couldn't give away in a plastic bag at a carnival.

Score: 4.0/10