Jaws Retro Edition (Review)

Jaws Retro Edition
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, PC
Released February 13, 2026
Authorized Nintendo Entertainment System ROM Hack
Originally Developed by Westone
“Enhanced Edition” Designed by Jeremy Parish
Published by Limited Run Games
$14.99 jumped the shark in the making of this review.
This review was played on a Nintendo Switch 2

This is really just a review of Jaws: Enhanced Edition, the ROM hack included in Jaws Retro Edition alongside the original game. Make sure to read my original review of Jaws for the NES. That game is included in this package and all the reasons why I awarded it a YES! are unchanged. I played one quick round. It was still okay. There is one small quality-of-life update to the original game: you can now pick-up seashells on the edges of the screen. Well, at least you can as the diver. Still can’t with the sub. Before I get to the review of the new game, let’s talk about the emulator.

Since this isn’t EXACTLY a retro collection despite having two games, I’m going to do a quick summary of the Special Features in this caption. Please note the lack of LJN logos or branding in the special features. You get a heavily censored ad, box art (no Nintendo seal of quality, either), the original instruction book, plus a jukebox with all the music and sound effects. There’s also a CRT filter and three different borders (four if you count no border at all) and three aspect ratios. Pretty basic set of extras. Nothing to write home about, but I’m happy what’s here is here.

Jaws Retro Edition features a solid emulator with one damning omission. It gets the job done with a clean menu that offers a single save state file per game (two games total: Jaws and Jaws: Enhanced Edition) and plenty of rewind buffer. BUT, it’s missing a couple very important gems to be a true Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation. In fact, it might be missing the single most important feature of them all: button remapping. Oof. Remapping isn’t just an emulation feature but an important accessibility option. Were I to treat this the same way I would review a retro collection, I would stiffly penalize the entire set for it, probably awarding half the maximum value since button remapping is required for players to comfortably connect to the game on their terms.

I think it’s great that they included a warning to do the saving manually. Even Digital Eclipse missed that.

There’s also no quick save or quick load, which I prefer to menu-based save states features. Quick save/load is often missing in most collections so I’m used to it, and there’s also no jump-in full gameplay videos. Given the random nature of Jaws, I didn’t expect it and don’t miss it. Finally, because of how Enhanced Edition is designed where getting automatic fire is an upgrade you have to purchase, they had to not include autofire as an emulation option by necessity. I don’t like that. To me, autofire is an accessibility feature, not a gameplay feature, especially in a game like Jaws that requires so much nonstop shooting at times. But overall the emulator does a good enough job to not ruin the game, and really I guess that’s all I should hope for. Now, with all of that out of the way, the real reason to buy Jaws Retro Edition is that the original 1987 NES game has been reworked and expanded. The included ROM hack, Jaws: Enhanced Edition, is one the greatest ROM hacks of all-time.

Very cool.

Jaws: Enhanced Edition was designed by the man I consider gaming’s most underrated personality and my personal favorite gaming content creator: Jeremy Parish. I even made my own NES Works playlist. I mean I sort of had to since, for whatever reason, he included the intolerable Athena soundtrack in the chronological playlist, even though it makes no f*cking sense because it’s not content HE made and offers none of the history lessons people presumably subscribe to his channel for. It’s just….. noise. Horrible, horrible noise generated from one of the worst video games ever made. I’m already someone who, to the annoyance of my readers, plays most games muted or with the volume very low. I would never listen to an NES soundtrack for fun, even the ones I like. But history lessons on games? I love those, and Parish does some damn insightful ones, always providing the background of games in ways that are entertaining and forthright. He’s a historian who has, gasp, opinions. As a holder of many opinions, I like that. Hell, we both felt Jaws was very Atari-like in its design, and now I’m honestly wondering if I came to that realization on my own or my brain absorbed it from his video. If you’ve never seen NES Works, here’s his Jaws/Karate Kid video. We certainly disagree about Karate Kid. Oh, it’s bad and I gave it a NO! because I’m not insane, but I think it could have gone down as a solid game with some minor fine tuning, while he considered it one of the worst NES games up to that point. Oh come on, it’s not THAT bad, Jeremy.

Anyway, the Athena soundtrack story, and it’s a true story: years ago, I was in a nice, deep sleep during a week when I was green with the flu. I was so sick that it was a tiny miracle that I’d been lulled to sleep by the scholarly voice of Mr. Parish providing detailed histories of early NES games. And then, all of a sudden, I discovered that, if I’m startled badly enough, I’m capable of leaping four feet into the air from a laying-down position using only my ass. I learned this about myself when the soundtrack to Athena BLARED through my bedroom, seemingly fifty f*cking times louder than any of the other videos in the playlist. So I must like his work because, instead of never watching his channel ever again, I made and maintained my own NES Works playlist that’s basically the same as his, minus that Athena clip. Something HE SHOULD DO HIMSELF! By the way Jeremy, I hold grudges and I’m vindictive, and I will get my revenge. Oh yes. You’ll be nice and asleep when all of a sudden your home will be surrounded by speakers blasting Athena’s soundtrack so loud that it will liquefy your organs. I’ll wait for him to finish NES Works first, of course. I’m not going to ruin it for everyone else. I’m not a monster. Maybe now that he turned Jaws from an okay game into a pretty damn good one, I’ll just blast the soundtrack enough to get a tiny trickle of blood out of his ears.

Actually I quit maintaining the playlist and stopped listening to YouTube when I sleep. Burned too many times by volume issues. I’ll stick with Audible. BUT, I would go back to NES Works as something to fall asleep to if he pulled that Athena soundtrack from his playlist (since I’m like 60+ videos behind). Jaws: Enhanced Edition? That’s a good idea. A bad idea is inserting an obnoxiously loud (and bad) soundtrack for a terrible game into a playlist that has no other soundtracks. As far as I can tell, the only soundtrack in that playlist of 228 videos and counting is that one, and there’s no way to opt out of it. You have to make your own. It would be like if you threw on a Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary marathon and, after a couple episodes, the marathon was interrupted for twenty minutes of machine gun noises and screaming. Then again, I would never want to go to sleep listening to anything by Ken Burns. I would (and did) for Jeremy Parish. Alas.

So what’s new with the “Enhanced Edition” of Jaws? Well first I want to stress that you should set your expectations accordingly. This is not a complete tear-down and rebuild like Deadpool did with Ninja Gaiden. This is an Iron Chef effort that utilized only the available ingredients. Jeremy Parish took the original 1987 Jaws and stretched out a game that could be beaten in thirty minutes into one that has much, much meatier action. Instead of just playing until you kill Jaws, you now kill Jaws four times because the game now is divided into four segments, one for each movie (I’m kind of surprised he didn’t include a satire where Jaws wears sunglasses and smokes a stogie). Instead of just upgrading your attack power, you now have to upgrade your attack power, your speed, and your health, along with collecting other items. At the start of each segment, all your upgrades are lost and you must start over from scratch, with the only carry-over being the money you earned. And there’s a hard cap on the max money you can earn that increases with each chapter to prevent you from screw grinding on easier stages. Upgrades are no longer automatically done when you pull into the port. You can select and buy them manually and create your own strategy. It works SO good, too.

Jaws: Enhanced Edition (2026)

Jaws: Enhanced Edition (2026)

Don’t worry about the resetting between each level part, either. Even with that, Jaws: Enhanced Edition remains a fast-paced action game. The seashells are still the currency, but now there’s two types of them. As I noted above, you can upgrade your health. Jaws: Enhanced Edition is no longer a one-hit-death game. You can build up life, and if you take damage, enemies might drop red seashells that restore a tiny bit of health. Also, those float to the top of the playfield while the money sinks to the bottom. Hey, risk/reward factors. Very cool. Meanwhile money seashells award different values of cash depending on the type of enemy you killed for them. The system Jeremy created here is really well done, making the combat more incentivized than ever before. I was a little worried about the speed upgrade, but it never becomes so fast that it’s out of control. He did a great job. Same with the attack power, which no longer applies only to Jaws. Every enemy’s health is accounted for with your attack power. Basic enemies can start out taking so many hits that they get their own on-screen life bars now and will level-up too via palette swapping. With each new level comes new attack patterns and faster enemy speeds. While the early enemies and the ways they try to kill you will be familiar to fans of the original NES game, all creatures eventually become legitimate threats.

No more invisible random encounters. You now see the enemies on the map, Zelda II style. Eventually you’ll get an item that even shows you the primary enemy type in the combat scenario (as seen in this screenshot), including the blinking ones that fetch quests require. Later still, you’ll get an item that freezes enemies so they don’t move about (excluding Jaws, of course). I do have one complaint: you can also see and pick up health refills and money using these items. I thought that screwed-up the risk/reward factors. Especially the health refills. Why pay $1,000 at the shop when I can just sail around and find health shells just laying around? Or if I need a little more money (which was rare by that point) why would I risk the combat when I can get it on the surface? His heart was in the right place because it removes some end-of-stage grinding, but, I mean, come on! It’s Jaws. The entire game is grinding. It’s an idea that should never have made it past play-testing.

There’s brand new enemies in the game as well, which is especially impressive because I’m pretty sure there’s no new sprites in Jaws: Enhanced Edition. Or if there is, they’re so small and insignificant that they don’t really make a difference. What Jeremy did instead was take existing sprites that were previously used as items and turned them into enemies. The stars and crabs are now antagonists that provided a much bigger challenge than the rays or even the jellyfish because he managed to give them some pretty clever attack patterns. The starfish multiply like sea bunnies and the crabs spit bubbles at you that, if you get caught in one, you can’t shoot for several seconds. Perhaps too long, actually, as I found them to be so dangerous (especially in the fourth level) that I had to fight them very conservatively. The returning enemies are beefed up with new movement and attack styles as well. The rays will eventually have a curve to their trajectory, the jellyfish float up and down and even jump out of the water, and the baby sharks (and yes, Jaws as well) can turn around instead of making a full screen pass. That causes them to cluster, but it works.

In the first couple levels, you get to actually land shots on the big fella BEFORE he reaches the boat. In levels 3 and especially level 4, don’t expect it. Still, it’s such a subtle little change. All Jeremy did was move Jaws a little bit down and then have him make one pass across the screen so you actually have room to shoot him a little. But this tiny change yields so much satisfaction. I really hope he’s proud of his effort. He did very good with the tools he had.

And then there’s Jaws himself. George Lucas would be proud because he becomes faster and more intense as the game goes along. Upgrading your attack power is not enough. You have to find the special items that allow you to kill him. The game will tell you how to find these things, which usually involves slaying specific forms of basic enemies that flash (you can think of them as mini-bosses) and/or retrieving special items from a map, including the submarine in levels three and four. The bonus stages with the airplane are removed from the first three levels, and in the fourth level it’s now a special challenge that requires you to hit twenty-one jellyfish. After doing this, you can then pay extra to attack Jaws with the airplane. By the way, I never knew you could slow down or speed up the airplane in the original NES game until I started Jaws Retro Edition and found out while searching for button remapping. Huh. I was already pretty good at the bonus round too. Once I knew about the speed control, I…….. actually couldn’t hit anything anymore because it totally f*cked up my muscle memory. So thanks for that, Jaws: Retro Edition, you bastard.

“Bitch, you’re bombing me from the sky now? I can’t go up there. Not cool.” You have to pay $5,000 for 30 seconds of bombing Jaws, but by the time you get to this point, you should be out of things to upgrade and this is the only thing left that costs money. None of the fetch quests cost actual cash, which might have been a mistake since, despite all the new upgrades, it doesn’t take long to max everything out (four times over, nonetheless). At this point, you might as well just bomb the sh*t out of Jaws. The only catch is you can’t score the killing blow on Jaws from the sky, and he’ll get two bars of health back when you finish anyway. You have to be in the water when you drain those off to enter the final kill sequence.

My biggest knock against this new version of Jaws, by far, is how spongy even the basic enemies get in the third and fourth levels. Another new option added to this game is you can abandon any random encounter that doesn’t include Jaws himself and return to the boat without any penalty. In the fourth level, I had to do that several times while I built-up my attack power and speed because enemies were sucking up bullets on nearly the same level (or hell, maybe even higher) than Jaws himself did in the original game. And mind you, I had the max amount of money when I started level four and poured all of it into attack power AND bought the double shot (the only level you can buy it). Every enemy was still a complete bullet sponge even after I maxed out attack power. It wasn’t until I got the submarine and the weapons upgrades in the stage that it didn’t feel like I was trying to take down enemies with spitballs. I certainly spent a little time questioning whether Jeremy took things too far with the enemy health. The first three levels were some of the best NES gaming I ever played. The fourth level is skinny dipping in an ocean of frustration, at least at the start of it.

Since Jaws basically requires everything to be manually unlocked in each level, the fourth stage started very slowly. Autofire? You have to earn it. Being able to shoot more than one bullet at a time? Earn it. You’ll feel the difference, too.

Thankfully, in three out of the four levels, the sponginess of enemies doesn’t take that long to overcome. Money drops are generous, and despite how much stuff needs upgrading, it still goes fast. In total, I needed just about five-and-a-half hours to beat the entire four level experience of Jaws: Enhanced Edition, and all of it was spent having some degree of fun. I normally play games as short as this twice, but my hands were, no joke, legitimately aching from all the sections before I bought the autofire. Again, you have to buy it four times total. The other problems caused by sticking so closely to the original game are the lack of variety in the backgrounds and the fact that the map is unchanged from the original game and it’s not a very good map. How you use the map is different. In levels one and two, you ONLY use the left starting port and can return to it as many times as you want without having to travel across the map and back. The right port does nothing. There’s no penalty for grinding near the shoreline. Hell, the game encourages it. In level three, you ONLY use the right port with the left port now doing nothing.

One jarring aspect is that it uses the same static screen for every item or major event. This one, which still looks like a fishing pole being rammed up Jaws’ ass, complete with look of shock.

Only the fourth level has you going to both ports, with different upgrades and fetch quests at each one. Even then, there’s nothing to prevent you from grinding. The rule that requires you to travel back and forth between each port is gone entirely. Eventually you’ll get options that allow you to press buttons to see where the enemy encounters are. Really, I don’t have any major complaints. I guess I wish whatever was the current “mission” was displayed. Like if all I had left to do to get a key item was encounter Jaws X amount of times, I wish it had said so on the main screen. You might also have to talk to one of the options in the port multiple times when you’ve already met the conditions to unlock whatever it does. It’s a little janky, but in an authentic 1987 NES kind of way.

See the little crosshairs? Boy, do they help. The act of defeating Jaws after you whittle down its health has gone from a confusing, sloppy mess to perhaps too easy. I went four-for-four in defeating Jaws in one shot. I never screwed it up even once. I suspect Jeremy wasn’t a fan of this sequence at all and would ditched it for something else altogether if that had been an option.

The most important part is I never got bored. Frustrated? Oh yeah, especially in the fourth level. But never to the point that I wanted to stop. Simply put, Jeremy Parish has taken a game that was a cynical cash grab developed in roughly a month that lucked into being halfway decent and expanded it into a game that feels like a much more fully thought-out experience and not the cynical cash grab. It sure as hell no longer feels like an up-jumped Atari game. Even on its own merits, Jaws: Enhanced Edition is a very good action game. Not a great one. Sticking like glue to the established sprites was admirable, I guess. But the original Jaws is the way it is because they took only a month to make it. A month. While I get what Jeremy was trying to prove here, there’s nothing inherently sacred with the original game’s sprites or roster of enemies. For all we know if they had two months instead of one, maybe someone on the development team would have said “hey, let’s put squids and octopi in this.” Jeremy, YOU ARE THAT MONTH! I mean.. you know what I’m saying. The bigger variety of enemies and tiers to those enemies is nice, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll still leave you wanting a little bit more. Still, taking a middle of the road game and pushing it to the brink of greatness puts it in the pantheon of ROM hacks, at least in my view.

Finding items and the presentation of finding them does lack a little in pizazz.

Jaws: Enhanced Edition feels like the type of ROM hack that a talented coder takes on as a personal challenge to themselves and not necessarily something that got a big, splashy rollout with full digital distribution on major platforms like Jaws Retro Edition got. That’s not a weakness, though. That’s its greatest strength. Usually the only “enhanced edition” style retro releases are reserved for big, successful games. The type of games already famous for being good or great, or at the minimum, historically important games. Jaws is a game that, whether it deserves the reputation or not (it doesn’t), it’s mostly remembered as a joke. It doesn’t surprise me that someone took what was, at best, a decent but very limited 80s action game and turned it into something much more substantive and enjoyable. I’ve seen it done before with games good and bad. I’ve reviewed quite a few (they’re under the “new games on old platforms” section of my retro index) and I plan on continuing to review them, even if only 0.1% of my readers will ever play them.

One of these days, I’ll get around to reviewing Super Pitfall! 30th Anniversary Edition by NES Rocks, which is one of those “personal challenge” games that is famous for turning one of the worst video games ever made into a competent and even fun one. Hey Limited Run Games: I’m pretty sure NES Rocks is available for hire. And if you ever do Goonies 1 & 2, use NES Rocks’ quality of life update for Goonies II. It’s really good.

Games like Jaws: Enhanced Edition DO NOT get wide releases. Except this one did, and nothing would make me happier than if mainstream gamers said “we like this! More please!” and publishers actually listened. They have these huge catalogs of ne’er-do-well releases that passionate fans have turned into borderline masterpieces. Jaws: Enhanced Edition isn’t as exceptional as it would appear. This is what you get when you let fans show how much they love catalog games, and you have to love a game to make it this good. Sucks for Jeremy though because if his effort had failed I would have given this a NO! and considered that revenge enough for waking me from my slumber. Alas, he can sleep tight knowing that, someday, he’ll look out his window and his house will be surrounded with skyscrapers. Then seconds later, he’ll realize those aren’t skyscrapers. They’re actually speakers, and he’ll know the debt is about to be settled.
Verdict: YES!