A Scale-raising Undersea Adventure! - Playing Deep Blue on TurboGrafx-16 for the First Time

Journey to an undersea palace in this fascinating (and scale-raising!) undersea adventure.

Well... it's official. I've played my first "bad" TurboGrafx game: Deep Blue

Now, I'm sure there is someone out there in the big blue world who will say they liked this game as a kid and it has redeeming qualities, but no, I just can't with this one.

Right from the outset, the title screen looks rather bland and it takes a few seconds for the title music to kick-in - very strange for a TurboGrafx game.

Then after pushing Run, I got into the game itself. Now there are plenty of bad shmups out in the world, but on a console like the TurboGrafx, with SO many great shmups, it seems even more egregious to have something so half-hearted (and half-assed) rear its ugly head.

From the moment you start playing something feels "off". The fish controls too slowly, the shooting seems odd, and the design and movement of the enemy fish just screams "budget title" in the worst possible way.

To be sure, there are powerups like most shmups, but a lot of the fish move in strange patterns that make it very hard to hit them, your fish actually can take quite a bit of damage before dying (probably a sign that the developers knew the game was hard because of poor design and made your fish take more damage before dying as a result) and I never even got to the "end" of the first level, if there even is one.

Absolutely everything about this game feel off and is unenjoyable to play. I think I'll be moving onto my next game rather quickly, as this was wholly unsatisfying.

You can see some of my painfully bad gameplay in the video below:

EGM rightfully eviscerated this game in their review (although they also crapped all over Ordyne, which is a masterpiece compared to this, so...)

Now that I've checked this one off the list, I'm quickly moving onto my next game, which will be...

J.J. & Jeff!

Not gonna lie. After the "awesomeness" of Deep Blue, I'm a little afraid how bad this is going to be, but nowhere to go but onwards.

Until next time...