Even though an audience may see the death of a character to be a sad occasion, it’s fantastic for the actor: you get close-ups you wouldn’t otherwise, and your dialog gets the poignancy only afforded to last words of the famous kind. Best of all, if you’re just some third-stringer paid to take pratfalls, the hero of the story will stop deliver lines long enough to pass the spotlight over to you.
And yet, not all deaths are the same. Deaths can be great for different reasons, or they can be terrible for just one.
The first way is to kill off a character that the audience loves. As it has come to be known, the unceremonious term for this has become known as “getting Joss’d” Blame Joss Whedon if you want, but he’s done it by creating characters we care about in the first place, one of the hardest things to do in fiction (the other is “Joss-ing” them, of course)..
For everyone else who lacks the writing chops, you can still cause a sensation with a character death in a story by making it a glorious death, or a practice familiar to your average slasher flick. You may not know these characters long enough to care about them, but they sure die in inventive ways that make you marvel at the human anatomy in a tourist kind of way.
It’s really simple: a character’s death needs to either provoke an emotional response in its audience or be a spectacle that will melt their eyeballs. As caring human being, I’m all in support for no one ever dying again, but as an audience member, I need characters to die well, and for a reason—otherwise, don’t kill them at all.
And that’s the problem with The Amazing Virtual Sea Monkeys, a video game very much like the Lemmings franchise except the player is embedded within the sea monkey world as a their personal protector. Problem is, it’s hard to care about saving these sea monkeys, and it’s even more difficult to find a reason.
It’s hard not to have a preconceived notion when approaching this game. “Sea Monkeys” were a comic book mainstay from the 60’s onward that were an aquatic version of the art farm. With most of us smart enough not to buy into such an obvious scam, a modern video game is the perfect opportunity for the public at large to delve into the secret world of raising sea monkeys, otherwise known as brine shrimp that are “brought back to life” from a condition that allows them to survive drought conditions of little to no water.
It’s the advertising that most comic book readers are most familiar with: a royal family of sea monkey, replete with crowns, setting up their castle in the humble surroundings of your fish bowl—who wouldn’t want that? Who wouldn’t care about raising their own team of bright-eyed monkeys?
However, the video game is as much of a scam as the original product. While The Amazing Virtual Sea Monkeys is not a simulation where you get to care and nurture this leftover pop culture fad, the reality is not much of an improvement. It’s an extended glorified escort mission in which the player must serve as the sea monkey’s protector level after level. Too dumb to think for themselves, the survival of the sea monkeys as well as your progress through the game depends upon the player repeatedly saving their worthless brine shrimp asses.
I won’t hide it: I expected a sea monkey aquarium simulator. Barring that, I wanted to care about these sea monkeys once I discovered what this crappy game is about. Barring that as well, I wanted these sea monkeys to die in glorious, exceptional ways for my entertainment. And even there, I was barred from setting up grandiose, complex murder plots with which I could do away with these damned, dirty apes of the sea.
It’s simple: just suspend a grand piano with a rope and pulley. It’s kind of a cliché, but maybe you’d need to read comic books to appreciate what I’m talking about.
How far I got in 15 minutes: I got to the crab level, and then I thought, yeah, I like crabs more than I like sea monkeys, so I stopped.
The good: As per canon, the female sea monkey is wearing a clam bikini.
The bad: A submarine under the ocean that isn’t yellow? What is this, an alternative universe in which Elvis Presley didn’t die?
Will I play this game again once this year is over: No. And no more X-Ray specs, either.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 32
Play-a-Daystation 