Shark! Shark! - Mattel Intellivision Demo

Channel:

Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

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982

Published on November 21, 2020 2:28:05 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7KUqOtkSA

Game:

Shark! Shark! (1982)

Duration: 5:00

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I recently had the opportunity to play with an RGB hardware solution for the Intellivision and wanted to make a capture of one of my favorite exclusive Intellivision games, Shark! Shark!. The Datapath did the video capturing honors.

Shark! Shark! is a simple yet addictive game designed around the idea that prey can become predator . You start off as a small fish and can be eaten by larger fish and other denizens of the sea like seahorses, crabs, lobsters, jellyfish and of course the sharks. You can grow by eating fish of your size or smaller or by attacking the backsides of the sharks. Eventually you will grow large enough to eat anything except the sharks and the jellyfish. Eating crabs and lobsters is a bit tricky because you can only eat them as they descend from a jump and you have to be of a certain size.

There are five "growth" stages to your fish and as you become larger, it will take fewer hits to kill a shark. You start at size one and grow a size by every 1000 points earned. The game has four difficulty selections which affect the speed of the sea creatures. Two-player mode is simultaneous and a player with a larger fish can eat the player with a smaller fish. The game is rather generous when it comes to giving extra lives, so I had to play badly to get show the Game Over screen and theme.

One aspect of this game I particularly like is the sound design. There are only a few sound effects, and I like how the bubble sound effects and others cuts through the eerie silence of the Darwinian struggle on display. The best sound is the ominous theme that plays when the Shark enters the screen. The blue border gives an "aquarium-like" effect to the game. The Intellivision only has an effective visible resolution of 159x96 pixels for tiles and 159x192 for sprites, so a CRT should show borders on all four sides of the screen even after the horizontal stretch. I reduced the capture to 360x240 and then expanded it to 1800x1440 to give a pixel aspect ratio not too far from how the system would display the image on a CRT.

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