#endless ocean wii

[shadowphoenixrider]

Finally got the Dolphin emulator confrigued to play the Wii game Endless Ocean with mouse and keyboard, and man

All young-teen memories came flooding back and it was like...coming home. I really miss that game and wish it got ported to the Switch, or even just a third game in the series. No other diving game really scratches the itch it does - just chill diving/exploration and occasionally finding some neat treasure.

I'm not fully home as the only ROM I have is a US version - if I could find a European version, or somehow find a way to dump the ROM of my own copy of Endless Ocean, that would suit me down to the ground.

It doesn't effect my enjoyment of the game, though. I love Endless Ocean, missed so dearly, and I'm so happy to be able to play it again.

[l3l-diving-service]

DID YOU HEAR THE NEWS

I DID!! I'm super excited! 🤩

Until I found out that it's on Nintendo Switch, instead of on the Wii. And I don't have a Nintento Switch. And everything I look at costs between $150-$300 dollars. 💔😭

[river-taxbird]

The Endless Ocean games on Wii!

Endless Ocean 1 and 2 are an awesome duology of Wii games where you scuba dive, learn about fish, and collect treasure. The main gameplay loop consists of exploring vast underwater environments, find hidden treasure, and interact with fish to fill up a fish-dex. Playing it as a kid even encouraged me to try scuba diving!

They look fantastic too, it's like, still the PS2 era graphics, but it's on Wii so it is like, the peak of that. It has that charming low poly look I have seen a lot of people craving.

Most of your time in the game is just exploring and taking in the environment, but there is always something to find. When you interact with fish, you fill up a fish-dex, and you can learn real world facts about them. If you play it, you'll have so many fish facts to share with people. (When they're accurate, the games are old)

They even have a story with pretty good human characters. The environments are fantastical, you visit ancient ruins, ship graveyards, even sunken castles, but the human characters means it always stays grounded and has some pathos.

If you are into older games and you're looking for a shorter length game with low-fi graphics, gameplay that doesn't really resemble anything before or since, and to learn a bunch of cool fish facts, I can't recommend Endless Ocean enough. I think they might be kind of rare these days, but they work great, and are thematically appropriate, on Dolphin, and should work fine with a normal controller, especially Endless Ocean 2 as it had Classic Controller support.

[bixels]

Finally made cover art for Project Pacifica.

[aquatark]

Ashore - Gatama Atoll

Endless Ocean: Blue World, Nintendo Wii

i think it would have been cute if you could see the marine iguanas walking around underwater too, since that's a thing they can do irl!

[fruitiermetrostation]

[oktaviaslabyrinth]

Nineball Island (Night) // Endless Ocean: Blue World (2009)

[plow-and-propose]

FINALLY!!

[keirashark]

THEY’RE MAKING A NEW ENDLESS OCEAN GAME

HOLY FUCK HOLY FUCK

ENDLESS OCEAN 2 WAS MY FAVORITE WII GAME IM GONNA CRY

[wowwforever]

EVERYONE

THIRD ENDLESS OCEAN GAME ANNOUNCED

[leolaroot]

wtf this shark is scary as fuck I'm afraid of him

[doyouknowthisgame]

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

oh yeah and for those of you wondering (no one) i HAVE ordered endless ocean luminous in hard copy, i AM waiting anxiously for its arrival, im TRYING TO HOLD OUT HOPE that i enjoy it more than the reviews claim i will, and i WILL be unreachable when it first arrives

[sludgepilleddirtcel]

endless ocean 2 blue world save me save me endless ocean 2 blue world

[aquatark]

My previous post made me realize that not a lot of people here are aware of Endless Ocean's bowmouth guitarfish glitch fiasco, which I think is a shame because 1) it's an interesting look into this game's history, and 2) I find it really funny... long-winded explanation incoming!

So! you see this guy?

You can place him in the game's aquarium, right? I bet if you've played the game, you've done it without even thinking twice!

...Well, in the initial Japanese release of Endless Ocean (known over there as Forever Blue), you couldn't. In fact, attempting to place this little scrimbly in the aquarium crashes your game.

Now this isn't too bad, since you can just press the reset button and continue your game normally, right? well... if you happen to leave the aquarium and save the game after having opened the creature placing menu, selecting a bowmouth guitarfish, and then closing the menu without placing anything... then congrats! you can never use the aquarium again, because it autoplaces whatever you left in that menu on your next visit! :D

In case you're wondering what this looks like in action, this video taken around the game's launch showcases it well, while also using the game's MP3 playback feature to put some anime music in the background, which I think adds to the experience:

So... how does this happen? How could something like this make it into the final game?

Turns out, this is due to how Endless Ocean categorizes creatures internally. Each creature in the game falls into a category, depending on the movements and behaviors the developers wanted to give them. For example, "migrate" type creatures follow a set of coordinate points creating a route around a stage, whereas "swim" type creatures simply swim around the area in which they are placed within a certain radius. Think of a whale shark's movements versus that of a butterflyfish - they have very different AI telling them how to behave.

Now, trying to load a creature of one type as a creature of another... does not make the game happy, to put it lightly. It doesn't know how to handle the request, and so crashes to prevent further weirdness from ensuing. There is only one byte (literally the second smallest unit of digital information storage you could use) per creature responsible for telling the game what type to load the creature as, and this includes when placing creatures in the aquarium. A slip of the keyboard caused a dev to type the wrong number in this byte, making it attempt to spawn bowmouth guitarfish placed in the aquarium as "swim" type rather than their correct "migrate" type. Literally one wrong number caused the game to crash, and for ears to bleed across Japan.

Since the aquarium is unlocked so early in the game, people discovered this on day one, in their first play session... and since Endless Ocean was a launch game for the Wii in Japan, that's even worse. It's not exactly a great look for your brand new console to have a game break so bad you can't use a mechanic anymore. And Wii game crashes are not pretty. So, Nintendo put out a statement on the day of release, notifying people of the problem, how to avoid it, and saying that a recall would be put in place. A week later, they released another statement, which stated people could apply to have their games replaced with an updated version, which would be mailed to them free of charge, by either phoning in or filling out an application online. This service continued up until 2020, over ten years after release! They really didn't want any copies of the broken version around... good thing we have archives of it!

The updated version even has different box art, with an added blue bar at the bottom, showcased in this incredibly crunchy image:

I love picturing Nintendo executives freaking out after a humble diving game causes such a mess they have to print the game again, losing them a lot of money and causing the game to get a lot of negative press...

I've seen old forum threads talking about the game as if it's garbage before it even came out internationally, because this situation was pretty much the only major news coming out about it. Can't have helped sales, at least...

Anyway, the game was patched to fix this glitch, along with a few other minor tweaks, and it was this version of the game that got translated worldwide. Japanese fans love joking about the whole ordeal, and I can see why! For example, on the bowmouth guitarfish's Niconico Pedia page (for which the closest equivalent in English would be something like Know Your Meme), this is recounted comedically as "...probably the most notable moment for the bowmouth guitarfish in the history of the internet", which is probably true! There's even image macros about it!

So yeah. The bowmouth guitarfish's reputation was forever tainted, and some Nintendo execs to this day probably wince when they see one.

tl;dr - A developer for Endless Ocean typed one number wrong in the code, making the game explode if you place a bowmouth guitarfish in the aquarium. Nintendo had to recall the game, and that specific fish has lived on in infamy among Japanese fans ever since.

Next time you use the aquarium, try putting a bowmouth guitarfish in there, and be grateful you can at all!

[butterflycultist]

Nineball Island

This small island is only 100 feet in diameter. Surrounded by miles of coral reefs, the island is a perfect getaway spot. Jean-Eric won it from a friend in a game of 9-Ball.

🌴 x 🏝 x 🌴

🌊 x 🏖 x 🌊

🌴 x 🏝 x 🌴