Jaws (NES) Review

Back in the day, the NES was a breeding ground for terrible licensed games that were stupidly difficult bordering on unplayable (see my review of Platoon for an example). So it’s doubly surprising when I play a licensed game for a console that is neither completely awful nor impossibly challenging. Not to say that Jaws is an unfairly neglected hidden gem that has not received its proper due up until now. It is most definitely a flawed game in many aspects. It just isn’t horrible on the level that say almost every Simpsons licensed game or Ghostbusters 2 is perhaps.

The plot of the game of Jaws is pretty basic. You sail around in a boat hunting for the titular character of note. That’s pretty much it. The gameplay alternates between an overhead view and a side-static view. The overhead view is comprised of you sailing your boat around in search of Jaws. Periodically you will randomly come upon an area that will switch you into the side-static view. In this mode, you are a scuba diver that moves around the screen harpooning fish for a while until I guess you get bored. The screen does not scroll, hence the static modifier in its description. Occasionally in this view, you will strike upon Jaws, who is significantly bigger than the other fish with more erratic swimming behavior. Also Jaws has a life bar that you must deplete to take him down. I was pretty surprised when I hit upon Jaws within the first 15 minutes of playing the game. I thought they would have saved him as a final boss or something to that affect, but really, he just shows up to make you feel hopeless (much like Jason in the Friday the 13th NES game). You see, when you first meet up with him, you can’t possibly get even close to killing him, not with that puny harpoon gun you start with anyway. So basically when you meet upon with Jaws, you just have to not die for a while until he swims away. You fire harpoons at him until your face turns blue, but it depletes his life meter so little that the futility of it sets in pretty quickly. So how do you kill such a beast? Sail around and upgrade your harpoon, of course! After several iterations of this, you can eventually kill him. The end.

So gripes. Here we go. This game has mind-numbingly repetitive gameplay. Sail in a boat for a minute. Hit upon a cache of fish. Harpoon them to death for a while. Upgrade equipment. Repeat until you can kill Jaws. Also I’ve alluded to the fact that when you stumble upon the fish, there doesn’t seem to be an indicator of either how long or how many fish you kill before the fish hunting portion is over. It seems to be a few minutes, but I really don’t know. Also the graphics are pretty bland and the music and sound is forgettable.

So that sounds like a lot of negative. And as a game, Jaws is highly mediocre. But as a licensed NES game, see, that’s where it stands out as a cut above many of them. It’s playable with a reasonable difficulty curve and gameplay that is at least mildly amusing for a few minutes. The real question remains, is it worth your time? I would say that unless you just really want to play a non-wretched licensed game for the NES, then you are probably better off playing through Mario 3 again.