Coarse Angler (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by Lemon Amiga.com
31Coarse Angler is a port of the Atari ST STOS game, created by Ted Moody and released in the Public Domain in 1992. This contains for arcade fishing simulator action, and a wide variety of fish and landscapes, so what better time to learn how to fish?
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Recorded: 11th March 2024
Narrated: 9th May 2014
Uploaded for Backers: 13th Nov 2024
In October 2023, Predseda tasked me with the job of capturing screenshots for this game for the Lemon Amiga database. He warned me that I "would not like it", but I loaded it up, and tried to fathom how it worked. Surprisingly, the game seemed to open up once I found a good way to snag the fish, and after that I was pulling em out rapidly. Catching the big fish at the docks seemed very rewarding, and in my test runs, I selected the Specimen Hunt and was lucky enough to draw a fish which was plentiful in the docks, and I won the match, and gained a nice digitised image.
When it came to recording footage, I'd already created a cheat sheet, showing where and now to catch specific targets, but the specimen hunt did not go well, as I could find the fish type it wanted me to find. But apart from that, the footage seemed good enough to at least demonstrate how to play it.
In the summer of 2024, I noticed my estranged half-brother was on Ancestry.com, and wrote a letter of introduction to him. He was open to me initially, and shared a photo of my father (whom I never met, as he left home when I was 3 months old) holding up a huge fish he had caught in the canal in Blackburn. It was over a meter long, and he was smiling, and I think he released it back after he caught it. My half-brother asked me not to share the image publicly, or I would have posted it at the top of this review, with a notice dedicating the whole show to my father (1949-2014). But even though I really wanted to do this, I could not go against my half-brothers wishes to keep the image private. (R.I.P Dad. See you in about 30 years.)
The narration for this is a bit louder than normal in the audio balance, but it was not spoken very loudly. The sound effects in the game seemed to sometimes create a strange clicking sound in my editor, which was not in the game itself. It did the same thing in the Covert Action review. The review is mostly silent, as I didn't think music would be very fitting to overlay on top of the game.
Danscore:
Fishing sims on the Amiga were generally very boring, but you cant say that art of fishing is anything other than 20mins of waiting, and 2mins of action, spread out over several hours. Coarse Angler tries to be a bit more arcadey than most, with a random timer set to no more than 40 seconds per fish, and this cuts down on 95% of the waiting times. Almost everything from real Bait fishing is in here, including different lines and rods, the clutch and various floats and sinkers, and the game feels complete even though there is nothing here to represent Fly fishing, or Sea fishing. Catching a fish is rather delicate and sometimes intense, and winning a fight against nature is often rewarding and tiring at the same time, and probably much less boring and harmful to real fish than sitting on a cold rain-soaked river bank. As a training aid, it's not bad, and perhaps the basics of fishing can be learned with this game, before going out there in real life? As a public domain game, I appreciate the digitised backgrounds and some special backdrop images, and the fact the game will save the details of each catch to disk, although you seem to need to do this manually by entering the fish into a log first? I came away from this with a lot of respect, and so I think it deserves a public domain score rating of 8.5 out of 10. With some flies and moving rivers, and some sounds of nature playing (like cows mooing, water splashes etc), this could have been a very atmospheric and absorbing experience, and could have easily been sold as a budget title. But fishing is a huge turn-off for most gamers, so if you dont like fishing games, perhaps many would give this a 5.