Feeding Frenzy

Feeding Frenzy

There's a certain point where you totally zone out and no longer realize you're even engaging in inputting commands, simply reacting to the events on the screen. It's a rare state, one desired by combat fighter pilots, and comes effortlessly to those of us who slammed quarters and tokens into pressboard and plastic cabinets filled to the brim with bits and bytes of digital stimulus.

Feeding Frenzy taps into that, with a game that is completely primal, twitch-based gameplay. You play a small fish, eating smaller fish until you get bigger, and can now eat the fish that previously would have eaten you. That's it, and the game would be lessened by the inclusion of anything else.

This is classic, classic gaming. The modern-day graphics are colorful and expressive, and the music inoffensive, but in the transfer to a home console, minus the unstated purpose of drawing quarters out of your sweaty hand, the challenge scales way, way down. Without the danger of completely unfair enemies and cheating AI included solely to get you to put in more change, the game evolves beyond a mere twitch-game into some sort of Zen-like experience, where the goal shifts from "Win" or even "Get a High Score" to simply "relax and have a good time."

While the lowered challenge bar can make it an uninteresting interactive aquarium screen saver, the game does offer the high-end "keep your combo up" type gameplay that can entice the more competitive to grind through this game more than once to get higher on the leaderboards.

Graphics: No better or worse than a fancy screen saver - colorful but clearly done on the cheap. 3.
Sound: One short. relaxing riff that seamlessly replays, and simple sound effects do no wrong, but don't stand out either. 2.
Controls: Crisp response time makes this eat-em-up not a chore to play. 3.
Tilt: The game can meet whatever expectations you have, but it's doubtful that it will exceed them. 3.
Overall (not an average): 2