Format: HuCard
Genre: Shooter
Developer: Pack-In-Video
Publisher: NEC

As the game's name implies, Deep Blue takes place under water, with the player controlling a fish, against waves of sea creatures. Wave after wave of brown and gray enemies attack over the top of a dull, scrolling background of sea weed and rocks. Some of the bosses are large and detailed, but have poor animation, and lack character.

Deep Blue's title screen opens with a sombre, funereal melody, and the stage music is similarly themed. While it is rich and full sounding, and has some nice compositional qualities, it just isn't a good fit for the chaotic schmup-style gameplay. Sound effects are practically non-existent, and there is no digitized speech.

Deep Blue is broken; the player's ship moves too liesurely to dodge the endless onslaught of enemies, and the weapons are either too weak, or have too low of a rate of fire to destroy even a tiny fraction of the things the level designers throw the player's way. Although with that said, there really is no level design to speak of, other than seemingly random waves of baddies against statically scrolling backdrops.

It's difficult to believe this game got published. It plays almost like a tech demo that non-game designers put together, then decided to package and sell. The developers tried to balance things by allowing the player to get hit, many times in fact-- but all that results in is unintentional hilarity as the player chain-bounces from one enemy to the next. What makes Deep Blue even more sad is that it featured on a console that has probably three dozen A-caliber titles just in this genre! Why anyone would bother with this title for very long is a mystery.