Sega Bass Fishing

Fishing is great, but sometimes the fuss is too much. There are the early starts, the tangled fishing wire and the sunburn. If you’re anything like me, there’s also the part where you put the hook through a piece of especially tough squid only to have it go through your thumb. Then there's the blood, the worrying about how your body will handle your new squid implant and wondering where your new ink pouch will sit.

What if you could skip all the hassle? What if you could wake up at midday, get a beer from the fridge and go fish in your underpants? What if instead of sunburn and squid grafts the only hazard you faced was pulling a muscle when you recline your comfy chair? Well, ladies and gentlemen, such an experience has arrived.

Sega Bass Fishing (SBF) is your ticket to avoiding the outside world, and it's coming at you on the Wii. It doesn't waste your time with plots or stories either - as soon as the game loads you’re catching fish.

Playing is simple –move your boat to a place with fish, choose a lure and a flick of the Wiimote (your rod) will have a line out on the water. Then you move your controller like a reel to bring the lure back to the boat – with or without a fish on it.

Catching a fish has a little more to it than just waggling the controller – when a fish grabs the lure, you jerk the rod upwards to hook it, and then you have to fight the fish. It can be really satisfying – more than you might expect – as often the only difference between bringing in a monster fish and losing your lure is some well timed slack on the line by waggling the reel other way.

If you think this is a new concept though, you’re wrong. Sega Bass Fishing originally came out in arcades in 1998, and also on the Dreamcast in 1999 – with a fishing rod controller which featured similar accelerometer technology to the Wiimote – and 10 years ago it was very much the same game.

Sega has not added much to the old Dreamcast game, only a game mode. There are now three modes - Tournament mode has you compete against the computer to catch as many fish as possible, Arcade mode where you compete against the clock to catch as many fish as possible and the new Nature Tour mode. Nature Tour takes away the rules so you can just fish at your leisure – revolutionary.

The Dreamcast was home to two more Sega fishing games, Sega Bass Fishing 2 and Sega Marine Fishing, both great additions to the series. After the release of House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return it would have been nice to see either of them packaged into this Wii “update”.

Worse, the game isn’t even in 480p, the max resolution for other Wii games. Sega has left the same graphics in the game, and it can only be rendered in 480i – or Standard Definition NTSC. I’m mostly surprised they even bothered to replace the Dreamcast logo with the Wii logo.

As one of the original underpants-wearing couch anglers, part of me would like to see Sega punished for their blatant rebadging. The other part of me knows there are many people who never played the original Dreamcast game, and Sega Bass Fishing is an ok pick-up for them. It’s definitely the best fishing experience on the Wii, but that’s like saying Formula 1 Championship Edition is the best F1 game on the PS3.

If fishing in your underpants is your idea of a cool way to kill some time, or you’re just trying to get your dad into playing the Wii you could do a lot worse than Sega Bass Fishing. Otherwise I’d kiss this one and throw it back.