Jaws (NES Review)

Jaws
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Westone (then known as Escape)
Published by LJN
First Released November, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

We actually don’t need a bigger boat. This boat is perfectly adequate. No notes.

Jaws is historically maligned, in large part because it was an early release by notorious NES publisher LJN. It’s also not exactly a thrilling game, and it was released around the time the really bad Jaws sequels had largely eroded the franchise’s potency. But, what if I told you that Jaws for the NES actually ain’t that bad. Or, even bad at all? It’s not amazing or anything. I originally had typed out the words “diamond in the rough” but quickly deleted them. Diamond is obviously too kind. It’s.. a half-dollar in the rough. You’re pleased as punch to find it lying around. Like, this isn’t a penny someone dropped and determined it wasn’t worth the effort of bending over to pick up. It’s.. a half-dollar! Whoa! Then, about ten seconds later you realize, wait, that’s really only fifty pennies, and you’ve probably passed by that many pennies and not bothered bending over to pick them up. You’re still oddly satisfied, yet bummed that it’s not as good as it seemed like ten seconds ago. That was rambling, but trust me,what I just described is the Jaws NES experience in a nutshell.

Jaws’ gets its first rectal exam.

Jaws is the rare NES game that feels like it still utilizes the type of abstract game design theory that ended with the Atari 2600. A short, very limited, very narrow-scope set of repetitive tasks that combines a couple different gameplay types loosely tied to the game’s theme. In the case of Jaws, the object of the game is to build up your attack power to be strong enough to overcome the humongous and initially ultra-spongy life bar of Jaws. You have an overhead map that has two ports. You have to sail back and forth between them, and as you do, RPG-like random encounters happen. Only, instead of turn-based combat, you play a very rudimentary shooter that lasts 30 to 60 seconds. There’s only four enemies in these encounters: stingrays, jellyfish, baby sharks, and Jaws itself. When you start the game, you basically cause no damage to Jaws at all, and any damage you do cause will heal itself four bars per random encounter. To build up your attack power, you have to rely on randomly-dropped seashells that you then cash in at the two ports for a progressively more costly +1 to your attack power. The only truly wise decision the developers made was forbidding players from going back to the same port twice in a row. You have to alternate between the two, and there’s no doubling-up. You can only collect one additional attack power point at a time.

During random encounters not involving Jaws, the entire battle takes place as the diver (or the sub). BUT, if you hit Jaws on the map, the encounter starts on the boat, where you can lob cannonballs at it. You absolutely cannot avoid Jaws, but it’s like getting free shots in, since once it touches the boat, you become the SCUBA diver and are invincible for a few moments.

So yea, Jaws is a game about grinding, but you don’t need to clear your schedule if you want to try it out. I beat it without any cheating (unless auto-fire counts as cheating) three times this morning, each time in well under an hour, and the third time only required thirty minutes. Thankfully, what little sea combat it has was decently done. It’s not a bad little shooting game at all, but like I said before, it’s basic. Four enemies. Four whole god danged enemies. Really, only two that you frequently encounter. To the game’s very limited credit, they get progressively more aggressive as the game goes along, but come on. It’s so creatively dead. As the SCUBA diver, you only get one single form of attack, and while the Jellyfish eventually do become a genuine nuisance (they got me a couple times), there’s no variety. Also, your power doesn’t affect anything BUT Jaws. Even the baby sharks take the same amount of hits to kill regardless of whether you’re a 1 or a 9. Once you’ve encountered Jaws for the first time, you’ve seen 95% of the game.

The random encounters I think must be based on a predetermined amount of “steps” taken. I noticed that if I rewound the game and changed direction, I’d have a random encounter regardless after the same amount of spots moved. However, I had one span where I crossed from one port to the other without a single encounter. Actually, I came VERY close to making two full passes. Also, it’s worth noting that if Jaws was close by (as pictured above) when a different random encounter happens, it’ll probably show up anyway.

The two ports aren’t even that far apart from each-other, either. That’s especially odd considering how big the map is. It’s not like you have to search to find the other port the first time, either. The game starts on the left port, and once you pull out of the harbor, a straight line to the right will bring you there. If you don’t suffer a random encounter, it takes under 10 seconds to get there. While it’s not a massive map, I get the distinct impression that they originally had bigger plans. Perhaps randomly placing the ports would have helped a lot. The only incentive to search is a randomly-placed submarine that, when you find it, provides you with more maneuverability and a second underwater weapon to use. I didn’t really like using the sub, though, and found its lob-style cannonball weapon to be kind of worthless. I didn’t really want to bother going out of my way for it, either. The task at hand was to build my power, which meant staying in that narrow space between the two ports, grinding out random encounters and hoping for seashell drops. Enemies also drop crabs (which make you go faster) and stars (worth points, which are worth getting since 30,000 points nets you an extra life). Oh, and don’t kill enemies too close to the screen, because your character can’t go all the way to the edge, and you might miss collecting their drops.

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You’re not entirely at the mercy of randomness. When you kill Baby Jaws, it’ll ALWAYS drop a seashell, and killing three or four of them will earn you a visit to a terrible bonus game where you drop cannonballs on jellyfish that are dancing in formation. You earn a seashell for every three jellyfish you hit. As you progress in the game, more baby sharks will spawn. Eventually, it won’t be rare for you to have random encounters made up entirely of baby sharks. The crappy thing, there’s a very fun game buried in this mess. I like the idea of the finishing line not being set in stone, but rather based on when you’re strong enough to take down one single enemy that you keep encountering again and again. Jaws is the only enemy in the game that you can see on the map. After visiting the port for the first time, you get a receiver that warns you when Jaws is nearby. You want to avoid it at first, since it’s impossible to beat it. With each power level, it takes a little less hits to take a single bar off its life. You won’t be able to put any lasting damage into it because its health restores by four bars every random encounter, whether Jaws is part of it or not. It won’t be until around level 5 you can put damage into it. If you’ve got auto-fire turned on, you should be strong enough to beat it on level 7.

By far the most challenging levels in Jaws are those in the shallow waters. Random encounters close to a coastline will happen here. The jellyfish become VERY problematic, especially when they rise out of the bottom of the screen with no warning and start curving through the water. When you die, you lose a power level and your speed is reset to 0. Jaws is a one-hit-death game, which is really the REAL reason you’d want to get the submarine. It acts as an extra hit point that you lose if you touch an enemy. I strongly advise you to not hang out at the bottom of the screen.

When you’ve depleted all of Jaws’ health, the game enters a third-person mode where Jaws comes at you, bruh, but maybe not DIRECTLY at you. It’ll swim progressively closer to the boat, and it’s just a matter of following it and waiting for the right moment. You’re given three signal flares that you can use to make Jaws pop and spin out of the water. There’s a series of lines that acts as a grid of sorts. When Jaws is ON the final line, not between it or in front of it, but touching it, AND it’s lined up with the front of the boat, you use the flare to pop Jaws out of the water, then you spear it with the boat. One shot and it’s dead, and you’ve beaten the game.

My description above might not be 100% accurate. Honestly, this is a pretty haphazardly done finale. Sometimes it feels like Jaws is aligned perfectly, and I still don’t score the kill. If you run out of flares, you have to go get more from the shops. After reaching level 9 in power, each visit to a port will net you an additional signal flare.

Once the baby sharks start appearing more frequently, the bonus stages interrupt the game too often. Sure, they’re 5 to 7 free seashells, depending on how accurately you shoot, but they interrupt the flow of the game and feel completely out of place. I also think a perfect score is impossible.

So, that’s Jaws. History has largely vilified it, but honest to god, folks, it’s not THAT bad. It just doesn’t come remotely close to having enough content. Variety is the spice of life, but Jaws is limited to four enemies, two battle arenas, a really bad bonus game, and a fairly poorly done mini-game finale. But, the concept of the game is enticing, what little gameplay is here is decent enough, and it’s over so quickly that you don’t really have time to get bored. The NES and especially LJN are responsible for some downright travesties of licensed video game shovelware, but Jaws isn’t among them. Given how shoddy most of LJN’s published library is, Jaws might be their finest movie tie-in. Golly, how sad is that fact? But, let it be said, the developers of Wonder Boy worked a miracle here. Do you know what the closest cousin of Jaws is? Sinistar, the arcade classic from Williams. Both are shooters based around building up the ability to kill one omnipresent big bad. It’s a genre that hasn’t really been explored all that much since Jaws, and I really wish someone would. In fact, I genuinely believe that everything presented in the existing game could serve as the framework for an all-time classic. If Westone had added more enemies, items, arenas, and locations on the map (and probably beef-up Jaws to accommodate all this new content) I can’t help but wonder if Jaws would be a celebrated classic. Someone at LJN should have looked at this and said “we’re going to need a bigger game!”

See that? I did a Jaws thing there. You got it.
Verdict: YES!