Sewer Shark

Sewer Shark is an on-rails shooter set underground in a devastated future, where surviving humanity endures in tunnels infested with mutated vermin. The player sits in the cockpit of a fighter hovercraft, shoots at targets that appear in the tunnel, and above all listens to the navigator, who shouts over the engine noise to call out which turn to take. This is the core of the game: at every junction you have a split second to turn correctly, and missing it means a crash. Progress is therefore largely about memorizing the route and reacting quickly to verbal instructions, supplemented by shooting that governs your score and access to further missions.

The game was created even before the add-on's launch and, in the year of its debut, became the very thing the Mega-CD was showcased with in stores. The entire tunnel run is a live-action, computer-augmented film running in a small window with a heavily reduced palette, so the picture is coarse and falls apart in motion. The sound, on the other hand, is a strength — the crew's recorded voice lines, the engine's roar, and bombastic music together create a surprisingly intense experience. The sewer environment is ugly and claustrophobic, and the acting performances between missions play out B-movie sci-fi with visible self-awareness.

At the time, this was a title that divided opinion: it was technologically impressive, but offered little actual decision-making in terms of gameplay, and many reviewers called it an expensive demonstration of the medium's possibilities. Even so, it was sold bundled with the hardware and became many players' first encounter with a disc-based game. As a dead-end branch of the genre's evolution, Sewer Shark is mostly of historical interest today — the gameplay is short, tough, and repetitive, but the enthusiasm with which it dives into its cheap sci-fi still gives it a certain charm. Still, it's worth booting up at least once: nothing else so precisely captures what manufacturers imagined a disc-based game to be in the early nineties, and the navigator's shouted instructions will stick in your memory for years.