Eu acho, assim, só acho, que o AVGN exagerou um pouco ...

Como muitos, eu ouvi falar desse por um dos vídeos dele, dizendo que era uma porcaria porque LJN. E beleza né, nada de novo aqui, vida segue.
Mas hoje dei uma jogada e... me diverti :o

O jogo pode se resumir a um shooter bem simples, onde você é um mergulhador atirando torpedos em arraias, águas-vivas e tubarões que não tem nada a ver com o teu dilema com o Jaws. Você faz isso pra coletar conchas que são o dinheiro que usa nos dois portos do mapa pra aumentar a força do torpedo.
De vez em quando você encontra o Jaws em pessoa, mas enquanto não estiver num nível de força avançado, não perca tempo lutando com ele, só desvie até poder continuar o caminho.

É um pouco repetitivo? Sim, em 5 minutos você vê quase tudo que o jogo tem a oferecer. Mas ele não ofende, os gráficos são bonitos, o som não irrita, é fácil, e... eu não vejo culpa neste jogo.

Surprisingly innovative game for the NES at the time.

There are a lot of games for the NES and most of them follow the same principle. Complete stages, fight a boss, and win the game.

Jaws on the other hand, was a surprise in terms of mechanics and playstyle. It follows an RPG like style, in which you collect shells to powerup your little fishing boat, preparing you for the final battle with Jaws himself. I thought this was pretty advanced for the time, especially for the NES.

You have a world map on which you can just sail around. Every so often, you get caught in an encounter and play a mini game in a different screen, in which you dive on the ocean floor, avoiding (or shooting) enemies and collect shells. All enemies are some form of wildlife like jellyfish, and smaller sharks. You sail back and forth between ports, in which you can trade in your shells to increase your power meter. You do this multiple times, wait for the encounter with Jaws to happen, shoot his ass, and win the game.

Every so often, you play the same mini game again, only this time, it turned into some kind of bonus stage. In this bonus stage, you fly a plane and freaking nuke the ocean and its inhabitants with bombs that you drop. The sole reason for this is to obliterate as much wildlife as possible and collect as many shells as you can.

In terms of the 8-bit graphics, it looks alright. There is enough detail and color in the world map and the diving stages and the animations work well enough.
The sound is also decent, although nothing special.

Jaws is innovative for its time, like I mentioned, but it gets repetitive very soon. You sail around, wait to be hit by some aggressive jellyfish, play the ocean stage, go back, rinse and repeat. Also, when you already collected many, many shells, and are ready to trade them in, you can only get one power level at a time from each port. This means going back and forth in the same, boring routine to the two ports, just to get the meter up. When you are constantly hindered by the encounters on your way, this gets annoying fast.

When you finally reach the maximum (or good enough) power level, you are ready to face Jaws. However, it is pure chance if you are going to find him. You recognize an encounter with Jaws by the overly large grey fin that sticks out of the water when you sail your little boat. Sometimes, this can take minutes and minutes.

Normally, when you encounter him earlier, you just swim past him and pray he does not hit you, but with the power meter at max, you are placed in the final, iconic scene with the harpoon and the boat. Jaws swims up to you, sometimes sticking his head out of the water, granting you an opportunity to strike. The only problem with this endgame stage, is the hit detection. You point your little stick right at him, but many times, your attack misses. As far as I know, it is pure chance, or you need to know exactly which 8 bit pixel you need to aim at.

Anyway, Jaws was fun for what it is, I finished it in a rush of nostalgia and had a good time.

[Played on Retron 5 with the original cartridge]

Jaws on NES is extremely frustrating, not because it's not fun, but rather because it feels like this game was so close to being at least good.

The main issue that holds this game back so much is how much you're punished for losing lives. You don't just lose your live, you also get docked down a power level, lose your Jaws radar, and your shell count (the currency needed to up your power level) is cut in half. That's a HUGE setback, and it gets to the point where you might as well just reset the game and start over. I believe the reason this was done was because this is a pretty short and easy time otherwise. Like the only way they could introduce challenge into this game was to fuck you over and punish the shit out of you for failing rather than implementing alternative gameplay challenges like so many other, better titles do.

You only ever contend against 3 enemies in the ocean levels. I think that's part of the issue. The game only ups challenge in those sections by altering how the jellyfish move and adding to the enemy count. I think adding more enemy varieties could have helped keep the gameplay fresh and exciting throughout.

Once you shoot down Jaws' health bar, you have to spear the boat through him (I haven't watched the films but I can assume this matches one of the movies' climaxes. If so, cool) and you only get 3 shots. If you fail, you have to shoot down Jaws all over again. This seriously bothered me a bit because I kept failing and failing. though the benefit here is that Jaws always comes to you, so you don't have to hunt him down, you just have to wait for him to come to you and then spam him to death (he doesn't really fight back). I think I would have preferred if this final leg of the game wasn't there, or rather that it was retooled into something more entertaining to play through.

I don't know. With the flaws that I see here the game just becomes nothing. I wouldn't say it's bad, but I wouldn't say it's good either. Just a passable title. I'd skip it if I were you, but I don't think you'd have much of an issue with picking it up, as I got my copy at a very cheap price.

5/10