Sega Bass Fishing: Surprisingly fun and addictive on the Dreamcast
It wasn't long ago that I wrote an article about how many useless game accessories have been developed over the years. There were various gun attachments that had no purpose outside of a few games, wireless controllers that in the early stages ate through batteries and had to be pointed at the television constantly in order to function, and of course ROB the ill-fated useless Nintendo robot that has a special place in our hearts despite being an expensive plastic piece of trash.
On the other hand, there are some accessories that only had a function with one type of game that totally made the purchase of that accessory worthwhile. Enter the Sega fishing rod
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The first time I saw this thing in Game Stop or whatever stores were called back then I probably laughed that such a thing exists. The packaging is also pretty hilarious because the space-age looking graphics don't exactly go hand in hand with what we all consider the overall ambiance of fishing to be.
I only ended up purchasing this kind of as a gag years after the Dreamcast was released and the system, as well all almost all of the games were heavily discounted because Sega was crumbling as a company.
I want to say that I picked up Bass Fishing and the controller for something along the lines of $10. I wasn't expecting this game to be any good but $10 is not a lot to pay for an experiment.
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Instead of a laugh, I had purchased what ended up becoming one of my favorite games on the Dreamcast system as a whole. One added benefit is that friends who would come over, even those that do not play video games always tended to enjoy this because it wasn't a traditional game. Sure, there was a level of skill to it, but for the most part you could just fire up the system and play this straight away.
Catching the bigger fish in the game was something that took careful planning and using the correct lures and what not but in the beginning stages you could probably catch a fish on your very first try.
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The way that they changed camera angles to show you on the dock or boat and then change to an underwater perspective as the fish struggles to get away is very well done and lead to many hours of entertainment. I can't even say for sure if this game had an ending - if it does I never got to it and would simply try over and over to get larger and larger fish caught.
At certain points in the game you would enter tournaments and even though it seems simple, the manner in which you handle the controls on the "fishing rod" required a great deal of savvy in order to get the job done. Although I do not do real life fishing I have been told by people that do so that the same level of expertise and attention to detail is required to catch actual bass.
The controller had gyros inside of it (if i am using the correct words here) in order to know which way you were holding the fishing rod and it also had vibration to add a level of realism to the entire process.
We tried experimenting using the fishing rod with other games and it actually would work but you couldn't accomplish anything in those games using this thing. It was funny for a bit but wore off pretty quickly.
There ended up being a number of fishing games on the Dreamcast and the arcade version of this same game is still popular in bars all around the world.
It started out as a joke but ended up being one of the best games for the Dreamcast if you ask me.