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It would have cost me a lot of quarters if Clockwork Aquario had come out in the early '90s. It is an arcade game that is fun to play and has a good soundtrack. You want to play it. I never got to play it in an arcade because it was never released. You can now play it on both the PS4 and Nintendo Switch, a few decades after it was first released.
The game industry shifted to 3D games. Westone Bit Entertainment was best known for the Wonder Boy series. The game was completed after two years, but by that time, arcades had moved on to 3D experiences and fighting games, and so it was scrapped. It was changed to run on modern devices by Inin Games.
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Clockwork Aquario is straightforward as a game. It is an action-platformer where you play as one of three characters running through a futuristic world, jumping on mechanical fish and popping strange balloons with your head. You can use the two main actions, jump and grab, to bash enemies or throw them at each other. The game is simple and chaotic, and each of the five worlds has its own giant boss to defeat at the end, which will require some pattern and quick reflexes to defeat.
The way the game looks is the most striking thing about it. There is a lot of amazing art on display here, with a wide range of enemies. Everything is mechanical, so you can see robotic fish and squids floating through the air. The new version of the Switch looked amazing, and there are a lot of options to make the game look better, such as adding Scanlines or making it look crisp and clean.
You can make changes beyond the visuals. There are three different difficulty options in Clockwork Aquario, which don't change the game itself but give more or less credits to get through the whole thing. There is a training mode where you can just mess around. In the days of arcade cabinets, you couldn't pause the game.
I am glad that Clockwork Aquario exists, but I am not sure how long it will hold my attention. It is nice to see a project that shows love for long-forgotten source material, even though video game preservation is a complex subject. The various game modes make it easier to play, and there is a collection of original art along with the soundtrack that you can dig through after playing. This release takes something I didn't know existed and turns it into a piece of history that I can play.
