Most of you have seen the hit television show on the Discovery Channel. I for one am a huge fan of Deadliest Catch. These guys are tough as nails, going out on the harsh Bering Sea for months at a time and fighting the extreme cold, the 40 foot waves and the 24 hour straight work hours. So how would this translate into a videogame? Now lets face it, most of the Television Show to Videogame ports we have seen in the past are downright horrible. We had American Chopper, Jack-Ass, etc… All of these titles were pretty much bad.
Taking a great show like Deadliest Catch was pretty much hit or miss. It seems pretty cool to be able to go out and drive your own fishing vessel on the harsh Bering Sea. But in this day of fast-paced first-person shooters, Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm was bound to be lost in the preverbial storm. So I really was not expecting much out of this title. I am an old-school gamer at heart though. And I was actually eager to have a go at this title. The end results are a mixed bag, but the good outshines the bad.
Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm was inspired by Sig, Edgar and Norman Hansen. The three brothers who have made their living crab fishing on the Bering Sea aboard their family’s fishing vessel, the Northwestern. If you watch the show then you know who Edgar and Sig are. Normal is the third brother who pretty much tries to keep a low profile on the show. These guys are like the modern-day Bee Gees on the Bering Sea. The Hansen brothers started game development with Liquid Dragon Studios in October 2005.
Gaming on the Bering Sea…
Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm allows you to charter five real crab boats, including the popular Northwestern and Cornelia Marie vessels. Players can also take the helm of much smaller vessels such as the Sea Star (Captain Larry Hendricks vessel, most of you know him from Season one of “Deadliest Catch” as well as “After the Catch”). Players can also design your own look and name your own from these five vessels.
The authenticity and realism of crab fishing were critical to the Hansen brothers. Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm features four real Bering Sea harbors and 34,000 miles of Bering Sea coastline created from the United States Geological Survey. In addition, Deadliest Catch Alaskan Storm is the first video game to feature United States Coast Guard vessels and helicopters.
The whole basis of Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm is fishing. You start off at the port, hire a crew, fill up your boat with fuel, pots and bait and set off into the unknown. You can map out how you want to set your string. Setting a string of pots is basically setting them in 10, 20, 30, etc pots in a line. You will have to let your pots soak for a while and then go back and see what you caught. Its pretty easy once you get the hang of it. My only complaint was that my fishing vessel kept veering off. I had a string of pots that were almost in a zig-zag. This made collecting the pots a huge pain in the ass. Once you go and check your pots you need to come up close to your buoys. If you miss your spot you have to go around a second time and it will become time-consuming.
The whole game relies on the King Crab and Opilio Crab seasons. You set out to make your goal of crab needed. Once you do that you go to the various harbors to offload and make the money. This may sound pretty easy, but you have to also keep your crew happy and alive. You will have to sometimes press your crew to the limit. Making them chip ice off the boat or having them work for 20 hours straight without a rest. Many choices will need to be made during your career as a captain. Every choice you make can end in various results. You could go out and have a good season, or you can go out and not come back alive. The developers and the Hansen brothers did make sure that it was as authentic as possible, and they succeeded.
Deadliest Catch also supports Xbox Live. You can take on other captains online. One strange thing is that you can use chat, but you have to radio the other players to talk to them. It sounds strange but if you have seen the show you pretty much have an understanding of why this was done. The show has captains using the radio back and forth for tips as well as chatter. That is why it was done this way for online play, they wanted to keep it authentic… right down to the online play.
Presentation:
The graphics of Deadliest Catch are nothing to write home about. It has a very rushed look to it. The shoreline looks plain and the textures are very plain and simple as well. The fishing vessels do look good but they have jaggy edges. The Northwestern and the Cornelia Marie are the best in terms of how the vessels look compared to the actual vessels on the television show. The waves look good but when you start getting 40 foot swells the game is extremely choppy and the frame-rate takes a humongous hit.The character details are pretty plain as well. The game does not look that bad, but it could have been more polished.
I think they wanted to meet the Season 4 premier of the show (and they missed it, the game was delayed for another month or so after the premier). The worst look in the game itself are the crabs themselves. When you pull up a pot and dump them on the sorting tray, the crabs look like a huge pile of trash. And the pile sinks down as you sort.
The game is what it is though. It looks good… but not that great.
Music and Sound:
Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm features the great soundtrack from the television series. The Northwestern theme plays as you guide the vessel across the Bering Sea. Bon Jovi’s song is also featured during the title screen. One huge negative is the fact that my fellow Maryland native Mike Rowe is nowhere to be heard. This is one of my main complaints about Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm. I am sure the developers had to fork out a ton of money just to secure the 30 seconds of Bon Jovi’s “Wanted: Dead or Alive” song.They should have just scratched the title song and paid that money to Mike Rowe. Having Deadliest Catch without Mike Rowe is like having someone other than Boris Karloff playing the Frankenstein Monster… it just does not work!
Another huge complaint I have is the fact that everybody’s voice from the Northwestern is used with the exception of Nick Mavar Jr. Why is his voice not featured as well? We have Sig, Edgar, Matt Bradley and greenhorn Jake Anderson… but no Nick? We are left with a cheesy, over-acted voice for Nick that sounds like an angry Irishman. Overall the music and voices are good, but having Mike Rowe and Nick Mavar Jr. would have made the game much better.
The Bottom Line:
Deadliest Catch Alaskan Storm is the type of game you want to play after a long, frustrating day of playing Call of Duty 4 or Gears of War. You can pretty much just sit back and go fishing.You can set your traps and chill. The graphics are plain and the frame-rate is very sluggish but once you get by that you can enjoy the game for what it is…
Fans of the show should be happy, but the typical gamer might pass on this one…
Final Score for Deadliest Catch: Alaskan Storm (Xbox 360)
7.9 out of 10
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