Go Fish! — A Game and Two Apartments From VEEMEE
by SealWyf, HSM team writer
All’s well that ends well, I suppose. After initial disappointments and frustration, I have acquired a nice little undersea apartment. But getting there was not smooth sailing.
The journey began when I purchased Go Fish!, a personal space from VEEMEE. Like their other recently-released properties, it’s a game embedded in just enough scenery to qualify as an apartment.
What you get for your $6.99 is a tiny cliff-bound beach with a few nicely-rendered palm trees, a campfire, a rustic shelter, a leaderboard display, and a pier with a bait shack. The sound patterns are pleasant — lapping waves, sea birds, and the crackle of the fire. There are four picture frame spots, on the palm trees and the shelter supports.
The beach provides scenery and atmosphere, with some potential for decoration. You stand on the pier to play the game. The fact that it’s a single-person game reduces the value of the apartment as a beach-party space. Forum posters have noted that two other game spaces from VEEMEE recycle the same beach, an economy that many find annoying.
As you may deduce from my remarks, I was mildly disappointed by the initial personal space. But then, I had not bought Go Fish! for the beach, or even for the game. What I was purchasing was the game’s final reward, the Underwater Apartment.
Before I could earn it, however, I had to master the game. As Home fishing games go, Go Fish! is pretty good. It breaks new ground in using a timed session, which is scored by the total weight of fish caught. This lets the game support a leaderboard, and adds an element of strategy to your bait selection, as you target the fish most likely to increase your score.
The casting process is also an improvement over previous games. There are two separate steps: the first sets the length of the cast, and the second its accuracy. The innovation lies in the second step, which uses the position sensors of the Sixaxis controller. You tip the controller back and flip it forward in an action that feels like a real cast, trying to get the slider into the sweet spot of the target bar. This can take a little practice, and the results are critical to the game. A moderately inaccurate cast scares the fish, increasing the time before they bite. A bad cast loses the bait, and you have to start over.
Once you have made your cast, you wait for a bite. Setting the hook requires another quick flip of the controller. Then you reel the fish in with careful mashes of the X button. If you play the fish too hard, it can break your line. Meanwhile, your fishing instructor, an invisible being with an annoying “old-timer” drawl, is shouting instructions (“Up!” “Right!” “Left!”) which you obey with appropriate tips of the controller.
Eventually the fish is landed, and the total weight of fish caught in the current session is updated. Then you re-bait the hook, and continue.
It would be nice if you could select your fishing tackle after each catch. There are only a few large fish milling around, but there are plenty of smaller ones. You should be able to switch to the light tackle to target the small fry toward the end of the session. However, your gear is fixed for the duration. This is either a bug or very bad game design.
Like other VEEMEE games, Go Fish! has an engaging, though sometimes heavy-handed, sense of humor. Most of the fish are fantasy creatures with humorous names — marine biology if God were a teenage boy. The only real fish are the three Legends: the Piranha, the Catfish and the Marlin. The fact that we have freshwater Piranha and Catfish in a marine environment just adds to the amusement.
Another source of humor is your invisible instructor, a back-woods geezer who maintains a running commentary on your performance. His drawling remarks quickly become annoying, especially while you are learning how to cast. However, silencing his comments provides a strong motive for improvement.
The game has a number of unlockable rewards. The first time you play, you receive a large, attractive aquarium, which starts out empty. As you continue, the tank fills up with specimens of the fish you have caught. It’s not as spectacular as the tank from the Dream Yacht, and it’s an active item. But it’s really quite nice. Getting this aquarium should be factored into the price when you’re making your purchase decision.
Most of the other rewards are unexciting. The two unlockable fishing poles are accompanied by ornaments of the poles on racks. Catching the golden fish rewards a set of gold chest-high waders. The three Legend fish each unlock a large wall-mounted specimen, items which are fun, but too garish for standard decorating strategies.
But the best unlockable, and the reason I bought the game in the first place, appears after you have caught every kind of fish, including the Legends. This is the Underwater Apartment, a personal space. As personal spaces go, it’s better than the space that contains the game. This is the reward that justfies the price of the game, and the effort of mastery.
It also, to some extent, compensates for the constant annoyance of software bugs. Go Fish! has been plagued by bugs from the beginning.
The first problem I encountered showed up in an odd glitch: the game gave me credit for catching a fish that could only be captured with the medium pole, which I had not yet unlocked. This was more puzzling than annoying.
The next bug that appeared was much more serious. Once I had unlocked the second fishing pole, the game refused to let me use it.
This was a common bug, and the Forums were filled with complaints about it. To their credit, VEEMEE responded quickly, diagnosing the problem and implementing a fix. But the process took a few weeks, during which time I was stuck improving my casting skills on the same few boring first-level fish. I was not a happy camper.
Once the game was patched, I caught the rest of the non-Legends in a single evening. Then I set aside a Saturday to handle the three Legends and unlock my Underwater Apartment.
The Legend fish are not only frustratingly rare — they also show up at certain times of day. The Piranha appears in the early morning, the Catfish during the afternoon, and the Marlin is a nocturnal creature.
The time-clue for the Marlin states that, like the werewolf, it only appears when the moon is full. Fortunately, I was reading the Forum discussions on the game, and it was apparent that VEEMEE’s copy writers don’t take moon phases seriously. I didn’t have to look up the date of the next full moon and reset my system calendar — I just had to wait until night.
After several hours of tedious fishing, I had my Piranha and Catfish, and was angling for a Marlin. It showed up promptly at 9 PM, a large green form clearly visible among the lesser fishes. And then it proceeded to ignore my bait, mooching around in the distance as if its favorite food was not bobbing a few feet away. It countinued to ignore my bait for the full 300 second session. As the clock counted down the last few seconds, I was literally screaming at the screen.
But then, the final glitch struck. The Blue Voice of God slid in, announcing that I had received a new item. And, when I checked the in-game scorecard, I found I had been given credit for landing the Marlin.
And so I earned my Underwater Apartment without really earning it — although I feel like I paid for it in full during the weeks when I was stuck with the beginner’s fishing pole. Someday I’ll go back and catch another Marlin, to set the moral ledger straight. But I’m in no hurry. I’m having way too much fun with my Underwater Apartment.
It’s a small space. Tiny, really, compared to the Neptune Suite, with which it is inevitably compared. There are three circular rooms, separated by differences in level and lighting rather than walls. Two dark rooms, with Nautilus designs on the carpet, flank a larger ocean-view space, whose floor is decorated with an impressive giant squid.
But you notice the squid-carpet second. Your first impression is ocean — a floor-to-ceiling window-wall, opening on sea and bubbles and fish. They’re the fish from the game, the familiar creatures from the Aquarium, as well as the three Legends. They circle your apartment endlessly in parade — not very fishlike behavior, to be honest, but still quite attractive. In the distance you see other undersea dwellings. This is obviously a community of the future.
It’s a much simpler seascape than the titanic gulfs of the Neptune, and you don’t have the cetaceans — the dolphins and the magnificent whale. But it still evokes the endless, peaceful depths. The effect is enhanced by the sound patterns — a constant bubbling overlaid by faint marine-creature calls, which make you feel like have stepped into a Jacques Cousteau documentary.
Other features include a fast-path to the Hub through the air-lock doors, and two picture-frame spaces flanking the window wall. As you would expect in such a small space, there is only one spawn point.
Decorating this space is fun, and can be taken in several different directions. The two darker rooms are excellent places to use glowing objects. If you have been wondering what to do with last summer’s luminous palm trees, this is the place for them. And the old Lockwood neon furniture looks terrific here.
I wish we had more steampunk furniture — I really want to set this space up as the bridge of the Nautilus. Lacking that, I’ve used some of the items from Lockwood’s Valentine’s Day romantic blitz to create an undersea cocktail lounge and “date night” space. I am pleased with the results.
And so we have a happy ending — a disappointing personal space and a buggy game end up being the key to a uniquely lovely apartment. I have described it to a friend as “the studio apartment version of the Neptune Suite.” But in many ways, I prefer this space to the Neptune. The lighting effects, the streams of rising bubbles, the Art Deco cephalopod carpets and the evocative undersea sound patterns combine to make this a comfortable place to spend an evening. The guests you invite here end up staying, and your conversations drift in interesting directions.
Rating Go Fish! was difficult. Balancing the disappointment of the original space and the defects of the game with the definite “win” of the Underwater Apartment, I give it a combined total of 3.0 Bubble Machines. It’s up to you to decide whether the final prize is worth the trouble.
- The final prize is a beautiful small apartment
- Better than most Home fishing games
- Beach space is somewhat disappointing
- The game itself is buggy, and has serious design flaws
March 16th, 2012 by SealWyf_ | 6 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
After weeks I finally caught the Catfish and Marlin. The first Catfish I caught didn’t give me the credit, which yes I was a little upset about but soon I caught another. So now it’s just the Piranha. Not really fond of this time thing though. It’s gonna be hard to get the Piranha if it only comes out in the morning hours, when I am at work! But oh well it is what it is.
Glad you mentioned something about having more Steampunk items. I got everything I could find Steampunk, time machine, back pack, hat/mask and pistols. I actually like the Rapture Apt for my Steampunk place. I got some antique furniture to add to the space but wish there was more. I seen on YouTube a video on a Steampunk/Victorian open space but don’t know if it came and gone already.
The Steampunk public space has been rumored for over a year, but I have heard nothing definite about it. Home needs more Captain Nemo!
If you feel like a little cheating, you can temporarily reset your system clock to fool the fish.
Nice article!
Excellent! Makes me want to tour it. Nice job.
I’m happy to have the Underwater Apartment in EU. The game was free to play as part of SCEE’s Welcome Back package last year. That said, I don’t feel compelled to buy the space(s) from SCEA.
Nice article, SealWyf. Your assessment is fair, balanced, and complete, even if I don’t agree with it. LOL I bought it after seeing a Friend’s space, because I love the accurate tropical feel of it: noises, breezes…even if we can’t go in the water. I didn’t care about the game because I’m bad at games like that. After a few weeks of enjoying it, I remembered the aquarium in my Friend’s space. Well, all you have to do is try and you get it. Then I wanted a fish or two for color and movement, so it looks real. I decided to try for 15 minutes every day & not worry about the results. The AI is *very* forgiving & I actually ended up with the apartment. I like it very much but I still prefer the cozy beach.