El-Fish

The Good
The graphics and animations are outstanding. Most games limits customizing to awkward mix&match body parts, but not El-Fish. Smooth movement and phong-based rendering makes these fish outstanding, even by todays standards.

The Bad
Some trouble getting it to run, but not more than I can handle.

Waiting for fish to render isn't as bad as it used to be, five to ten minutes on a P300.

The Bottom Line
All gamers have one special game they love. This is mine. Most will not get its inner beauty, but I did. And it charmed me off my feet.

The Good
This game— toy, really— entranced me like nothing else before or since. Designing tanks was fun, breeding and mutating fish was fun. Many other aquarium simulators have been developed since, but none have come even close to the depth offered by El Fish.

The Bad
I first played this on a 386 and spent hours and hours animating fish (usually overnight).

The Bottom Line
If you're the kind of person who can visit the same public aquarium more than once, this software toy was meant for you.

The Good
This game truly was a graphical marvel in it's day, and it still looks pretty incredible. The fish really do perform very life like, and swim realistically. It's fun to create aquariums with diving men and bubbling treasure chests. The math and programming that make this program work is pretty amazing. It is a really neat idea.

The Bad
There is not much to do here. It really isn't a game. It's not a design flaw, if you accept the program for what it is, a fish simulater, you will enjoy it much more. Another problem is some of the tools that they give you to import your own graphics, have many limitations and are clumsy to use. The last problem is that if you have a old machine (486) it take a bit to render a fish. If you don't have a math co-processor it will take a few hours.

The Bottom Line
Picture a truly beautiful fish tank simulator, that you can mate, mutate and catch fish for. You can decorate the tank, feed the fish, and develop background music. It's like a really nice screensaver, except you can't use it as one.