The Scoreboard #13

Sea Life Safari

Puns are annoying, but it’s kind of cute in Sea Life Safari’s title. Probably because no matter what this game does, it’s impossible to get mad at it. The Zen experience it provides will have you chilled out and completely relaxed for hours at a time, so it’s hard to be angry at it, or its stupidly simple gameplay. Being so simple, this seawater-shutterbug simulator is heavy on the Achievement distribution, and light on underwater effort. Let’s... ahem, take a dive in to the details!

Best Achievement: Underwater Adventurer (30 pts.) Unlock all levels. – Unlocking levels will require you to be a mean photo-taking machine, since star ratings are the key to unlocking levels, and they don’t really come easy in a lot of cases. This offers a satisfying, though not terribly difficult challenge, and on the way to becoming an Underwater Adventurer, plan on unlocking a great deal of the fairly easy Achievements. There’s big points in shooting for this star.

Worst Achievement: Shell Collector (30 pts.) Find all of the hidden Collectible Shells in the game. – Collecting is lame, especially when some of the collectables are hidden away in secret areas only accessible by taking a specific photo. The gold Shells in Sea Life Safari are everywhere, but trying to find that last one in each level is aggravating, on account of being on rails. Expect to get dizzy spinning in circles like a maniac in pursuit of clams.

Easiest Achievement: Paparazzi (30 pts.) Fill your Favorites Photo Log with at least 50 photos. – The process of taking 50 snaps and archiving them is kind of time consuming – you’ll need to play a few levels before you even get to 50 images – but it’s as easy as mashing the ‘stash picture’ button after you’ve completed a dive. The jerk who criticizes your images will no doubt let you know how terrible that last image of a starfish sitting on a rock was, so make sure you put all of those away. He’s got no use for ‘em, but you sure do!

Hardest Achievement: Shell Collector (30 pts.) Find all of the hidden Collectible Shells in the game. – As stated earlier, this is a nuisance. This isn’t difficult in the way Ninja Gaiden is tough, or the way super-tough AI in Soulcalibur is, but it’s definitely a task and a half as you search the seas for shell-plunder. There are dozens of these silly little buggers, so you’ll be swimming through levels more than once, probably doing some aquatic hair-pulling when you’re down to the last few.

Time Investment vs. Payoff: 7 (out of ten) – While it’s certainly a bummer that it’s necessary to play each level thrice (or more) to unlock all the Achievements, they really don’t take that long. The slow pacing really makes the whole thing feel dragged-out, but in reality, after a solid hour you’ll have a satisfying amount of Gamerscore unlocked from the depths of this Pokémon Snap pseudo-sequel.

Overall: 8 (out of ten) – Despite forcing you to play each level three times before special items appear, Sea Life Safari is a great XBLA title to rip some points out of. Simple snapshots of everything will garner you Gamerscore over the course of a couple hours, and by the end of the run you’ll easily have over 100 points. Collecting shells isn’t fun, nor is it worth putting in the time to find all of them, but shutterbugs will dig the underwater wildlife and their respective Achievements.

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