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An excellent game for divers on Wii

Swim lazily over coral reefs, admiring the fish and listening to the soothing sounds of Hayley Westenra.  Endless Ocean is console psychotherapy, and it’s totally brilliant.

It’s is a game with missions and objectives. You do get a feeling of accomplishment after acing
another task or finding a particularly pretty sort of fish or a whale or a six gill shark.

You play a diver with a massive boat and a chunk of ocean to explore. We picked a female because
we didn’t really want to get a close-up view of neoprene-clad manbits in the event of a camera
malfunction, but the choice is entirely yours. Give her a name (ours is called Nemo) and a hairdo,
then jump off the boat and witness an underwater scene that will take your breath away.

In the early parts of the game, the aim is simply to explore the reef and learn about the fish. There
are around 200 species to discover, with loads of different ones in each area. When you see one that
looks new, you tickle it with the Wii remote and it’s added to your log book back on the boat.

The undersea landscapes are stunning. Sites of special interest are dotted around the ocean, and the
camera takes a dreamy tour through their towering coral spires and into dizzyingly deep trenches
whenever you chance upon one during a dive.

It’s controlled entirely with the remote. There’s a blue dot which the diver swims towards when you
hold B, or the minus button makes her swim automatically, saving finger muscle. Other functions
like the map, fish food, coloured pens for defacing the sea and a camera for recording what you’ve
seen, are easily accessible. Gaming skill is not an issue.

Moving the boat from place to place, diving in the limited range allowed and uncovering the map,
is addictive in itself, but there are tasks to be performed. The boat is hooked up with email, through
which other characters get in touch and arrange meetings. You’ll get to go on torch-lit night dives,
search for treasure and explore sunken ruins.

There’s never a feeling of danger, even when a huge shark appears and the reef drops away into a
black abyss. It gave us a bizarre feeling of vertigo, like hitting turbulence in a plane but without the
sense of impending death. It’s completely unlike any other game, with the possible exception of
soaring on the hang-glider in Pilotwings 64.

Although the objectives aren’t strictly necessary other than to provide a break from the otherwise
aimlessly relaxing exploration, they seem the only way to earn the right to visit certain parts of the
game. You can’t dive in the deepest trenches or go out at night until you’ve satisfied certain
conditions.

Fishing for compliments
There’s a plot involving your boating companion, a girl who stands around in a lifejacket looking
depressed. Maybe she just doesn’t like fish. Maybe she can’t swim. Maybe her dad was swallowed
by a giant whale, which she’s spent her life searching for. Whatever the reason, there’s a lot of
teaching tricks to dolphins.

But then that’s enough for us, after hours of sailing, swimming and admiring. Hayley Westenra was
quickly silenced in favour of MP3s on the SD card, but the game keeps calling us back and we
think this’ll stay in the Wii for a long time.

So that you don’t have to remember where all the different fish habitats are, there’s an aquarium that you can stock up with anything you’ve found so far.  Great game we love it.

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