Feel free to share anything about El-Fish (1993) here!

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

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.

Well, to be fair, clock speed is not everything. Other factors like the used bus system, available memory etc. may very well influence the performance. Though for sure, the makers themselves would tend to rather publish the lower numbers, wouldn't they?