Popularity Of Scuba Diving

popularity of scuba diving

Water, Water Everywhere (Especially In Our Video Games)

Is space really the final frontier?. But when it comes to video games, it's difficult to think of a frontier that has been explored to any greater degree. In recent years, the situation has improved somewhat as games designers have settled on frontiers closer to home. Though Jamaican crabs have been recommending it to us for two decades, games are all too irregularly journeying to under the sea for thrills and spills. To start somewhere near the end of the story, probably the peak of aquatic popularity has been 'Bioshock'. A game in which one uses sea slug goo to zap drug crazed sea dwellers controlled by an Ayn Rand obsessive. This isn't exactly one of your tropical Scuba Diving holidays. Nevertheless, the tension of the piece and a glorious mid-game golf simulation bought the genre, and video gaming itself to new heights (or, heights that everyone ignored when 'System Shock 2' originally reached them). It earned itself a rather slapdash sequel which did well to include several ocean-floor based scenes that enhanced the atmosphere.

Life under the waves has seldom been all that pleasant though. Slippery 90s mascot character 'Ecco the Dolphin' appeared in a series of difficult and actually quite harrowing Mega Drive games. But the title had quite a deep story in which sea-bound mammals are sentient and aliens are harvesting the earth's oceans for food. You got the full experience of Shark Diving and melee that you'd be insane to try, or want to try in a real world context. Well, if you were a dolphin too, of course.

But as gaming audiences have changed and new markets have appeared, the sea has been used for a far more gentle experience. 'Endless Ocean' is an example of this more simulation-like (or simulation-lite) approaching, attempting to mimic the Maldives diving experience in a kind of fictional Pacific Ocean where the weather is always pleasant and your Oxygen is unlimited. The one thing you can definitely call this game is 'pleasant'. Not a classic by any means, but it tries very hard. At the very least it's commendable to see a game that is finally about appreciating nature, rather than hunting it.

MS Prinsendam anchors at Robinson Crusoe Island (Chile), february 2010