Semi-Sweet Nothing: Clockwork Aquario

Better late than never. But not
much better.

Westone's Clockwork Aquario is the quintessential arcade game... loud, colorful, and unapologetically dumb. Perhaps a little too dumb, considering that it missed arcades entirely and was instead ported to modern game consoles like the Nintendo Switch. While it's great from a preservation standpoint that Clockwork Aquario was finished and released, the game itself is a distressingly empty experience, even by the standards of a 1994 arcade title, and certainly now, nearly thirty years after Westone started designing it.

As one of three heroes (the distinctly average, verdant-haired Londo, his panty-flashing female counterpart Elle, and a derpy walking scrap pile named Gush), it's up to you to destroy the mechanical island fortress of the sinister, fish-faced Dr. Hangyo. As you might expect from the title, most of your enemies in Clockwork Aquario are robotic sealife... fire-spitting clams, hungry pikes, and balloons bearing Hangyo's Piscean likeness. The balloons are harmless but nevertheless irritating, getting in your way as you try to fight schools of flying fish and hop to nearby platforms.

Clockwork Aquario tries to bring technique to its simple gameplay... punching out a fish stuns it briefly, letting you toss it into clusters of nearby enemies for a big point bonus. Alternately, you can hop on stacks of Hangyo's balloons to reach distant items and further boost your score. The problem is, the collision detection is a little sketchy (prepare to swear as you're somehow injured by the creature you tried to stomp), the sprites are too large for precision platforming, and crowds of monsters guarantee cheap and frequent deaths. You "get" what Westone was trying to accomplish with Clockwork Aquario, but the play mechanics just don't hold together well. You'll think you've got the hang of it, only to credit feed in frustration as the flat level designs become more annoying and you're overwhelmed with fishy foes.

On the plus side, Clockwork Aquario is colorful and cartoony, a pleasant throwback to the good old days of video games when the extreme violence of Mortal Kombat was more the exception than the rule. At the end of every stage, Dr. Hangyo appears in a marine mech, ranging from a shell-clapping otter-bot to a bulbous penguin that can't seem to keep its pants around its waist. (Do penguins even have waists? Talk about mission impossible.) It's a treat for the eyes, but as a game, Clockwork Aquario wouldn't have been good in 1994, and isn't particularly good now. It's one of those coin-ops you would have walked away from after feeding it a handful of quarters, and it's just barely worth the three dollars it costs now. Don't even think of paying the full retail price for this one.

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