El-Fish (630)
Company: Electronic Arts
Year: 1993
Genre: Strategy
Theme: Life Simulation / Unique
Language: English
Licence: Commercial
El-Fish (ID: 630)
- Disks:
- 4 x 3.5" HD (1440kB)
- Format:
- Raw (.IMG)
- Status:
- Unverified
- Language:
- English
- Contributor:
- Wandrell
- SHA1 Hashes:
adef922c583882bbff9b89d84ae33dc2f80e6baa disk1.img 2c52fc0de875e32ef5471d5b2b887386855a5973 disk2.img 4db09a02cd0c946c4ada0ba9ac62a4f9b69393c6 disk3.img 1df17d0c518779e85fe53220c2b24525cc3e8c8e disk4.img
Added: 2013-12-07
Edited: 2020-04-20
Comments (4) [Post comment]
Yah, it was very processor intensive, which was probably a major reason it didn't make it. It used to take me hours to animate a single fish, I usually set it up to run that while I slept. I actually don't even run it in DOSBox, since it runs much faster without it. ^^
It was billed as a 'software toy', not really a 'game'. It didn't give you set goals, you had to make them youself, in terms of specializing fish with traits you wanted. For instance, 'white' fish are very hard to get, its a very recessive gene. It was a goal of mine for a long time to breed a white fish, I went from a small white spot to a mostly-white fish. Took a while of selective breeding, but it was cool to see how the genes worked out.
This kind of open ended 'sandbox' design seems to have a pretty niche fanbase. And I assume many folks don't find the idea of virtual-genetics as fascinating as I do, lol.
The German magazine PC Player actually refused to give this game a rating because of too little gameplay. They commented how this must be a late Aprils Fools and that it's almost fraud selling it as a game.
It should also be noted that this game only became seriously usable years after its release. On contemporary hardware, it would take something between 15 minutes (486/50MHz - nobody had that, though) and six hours (386SX - very common machine at that time) to calculate all the necessary animations for a single fish. Which (again) led to PC Player jokingly declaring its ability to double your free time: "If you're playing El-Fish for one hour, you can do something else for 58 minutes."
Edited by Mr Creosote at 21? on May, 08th 2006