Review: New Sega Title Seaman

Sept. 20, 2000 -- Think your roommate is cranky? Try Seaman.

Seaman is a Sega Dreamcast title developed by Vivarium and released last month that features horrible-looking, yet strangely compelling, fishmen creatures. You, the gamer, must help these creatures evolve by visiting them each day, giving them food and heat, and, well, a certain amount of affection.

Remember the Tamagotchi, Bandai’s virtual reality pet that exploded onto the American toy scene in 1997? Cross a Tamagotchi with a Furby — the animatronic pet that “learns” how to speak English — and you’d get something a lot like Seaman. You talk to it; it talks to you. You and the creature get to know each other, perhaps too well at times.

A microphone included with the game helps facilitate communication between you and the fish-thing on the other side of the screen, where the Seamen swim around in an aquarium-type setting.

If it sounds strange, it is. But the game — if you can call it that — is also the best-selling title, according to Sega, in the short history of the Sega Dreamcast in the platform’s home country, Japan.

Getting Personal

It’s programmed with more than 10,000 responses, according to Sega. But that’s not necessarily obvious from playing the game. Many times, Seaman will reply to a simple question with a stock phrase that may or may not be an appropriate answer.

But it’s when Seaman asks the questions that it really gets interesting.

Seaman wants to know all about its handler and asks all sorts of questions — some very personal. Seaman will even offer advice, or, if the speaker sounds glum, it will ask what’s wrong.

The creature stores that information somewhere in its AI archives, and pulls it out every now and then to surprise you. Other times, a particularly surly Seaman will declare “I’m not talking to you.”

All attempts at communication are met with a childish “MMMMMmmm.”

Sometimes, Seaman will ask if anyone else is in the room. If the answer is yes, he’ll say ‘never mind.’ Seaman, it appears, does not want to risk embarrassing its owner.

After all, that might lead to fewer encounters Seaman requires toevolve. In the end, as much as he/she/it appears at times to almost resent its human owners, it is we — the human gamers — it needs to help its kind survive.

A Matter of Life and Death

And that’s where the game gets weird. Don’t get too attached to thecreatures, because they can and do die — even if you do everything right.Part of the Seaman evolution involves procreation, and both that act and the act of birth itself involve death.

This is strangely sad even though the Seaman is seldom nice or pleasant. But don’t worry, says narrator Leonard Nimoy — the Seaman didn’t mind using its last bit of life energy to help prolong and evolve its species.

In Japan, the complete lifecycle of the Seaman took about six months. For our shorter American attention spans, the creators have shortened it to six weeks. Two weeks of almost-daily care. Skip a day, and the little beasts are cranky.Skip more, and they could be dead — the kind of death that does not help prolong the species.

Different Kind of Game

If you’re waiting for something to shoot, or at least punch, keep waiting. The most violence you can do here is flick the glass of its tank with a fingertip.

But this is not intended to be a game one “plays” so much as something you spend some time with, similar to the best-selling computer-game, The Sims, a “people-simulator” where you control the domestic lives of a suburban neighborhood. You’re actually supposed to develop a relationship with this thing — a few minutes at a time, each day.

If you think that’s strange, its creator Yoot Saito is even stranger. He asked one online gaming magazine IGN.com if he could do an interview on the Seaman as though it were real, and he not a game developer, but a researcher uncovering the secrets of the Seaman. (See his Web page at side.)

Hey, it worked in Japan — there, he said, some people may still think it’s real.

And if you find Seaman ugly, that’s fine. He told IGN.com that he wanted Seaman to have a disturbing, not-cute character. This ain’t no Pokémon.

Edward Mazza, ABCNEWS.com’s overnight producer, spends at least part of his days caring for Seaman.