Ecco The Dolphin... I hate you.
How much fun would it be to live life as a dolphin? Doing jumps, flips and sonaring other sealife in the face. Life under the sea is better, everyone knows this.
Ecco the Dolphin lets you experience the joys of dolphinity for about twelve seconds until you are sucked into a time vortex and forced to look for the lost family of other single minded dolphins. "Go meet big blue" says one, why?, WHY? I guess I shall never know because dolphins can only repeat the same line over and over again. For some reason all the dolphins in the sea have decided that you should help them out because of some weird sea phenomena and only Big Blue knows the answers. It turns out he can only speak about two sentences also.
In the near future it appears that everything under the sea wants you dead. Crabs, pufferfish, seahorses, sharks, the lot. Who knew that all the creatures of the sea wanted to see dolphins dead, why so much dolphin hate? They cant help it if theyre clever. Ecco however shows his cleverness by not being able to swim in a straight line, sometimes he can nose-butt other creatures that come thick and fast at his stupid starred face, but chances are he will miss because when needed to dive upwards he will dive downwards at a strange angle and vice versa.
Not only does ALL sealife hate Ecco but so does the sea itself. Ecco is unable to swim under the water for more than about... well, adequate time to be killed by whatever hates you in its perpetual screen-spawning ways. Why does he even bother? He just can't win against the aliens... aliens you say? Yes, Ecco is a game where aliens are going to take over the world or somesuch nonsense, Its pretty amusing in a completely nuts kind of way. The aliens come from the DOLPHINUS galaxy, Trust me i'm not making this up.
Once you get past the initial dificulty spike, and when i mean spike i mean "vertical line upwards" You will be met with increasingly harder levels where you will find it tough to make the simplest of jumps over brick walls, Be crushed by iceblocks with dodgy hit-detection and be chased by trillobites. Yes, even the prehistoric creatures hate Ecco. Pteradons are cool with him though and may give him a ride, at least something gives him a break..
The Atlanteans want him dead also.
Time travel features heavily in Ecco also if you haven't given up by that point or broken your controller. The final few levels are more forgiving in that they give you a death donar to shoot sharks in their fin-faces and let you breath underwater without fear of drowning. Yes, dolphins can drown! This rule is broken when you have to search for a pod of dolphins trapped deep beneath the sea. If theyre so good at not needing air how come the saviour of all life on the planet in the world ever cannot? They did manage to get trapped in caves behind boulders so i guess that balances things out a bit.
When i mentioned forgiving earlier I LIED to you, Ecco is never forgiving. In giving you the gift of infinite air and death sonar you are then blessed with the memorize-or-die mazelike screen scroll. where not only can you go the wrong way because it guides you in that direction, but you are being chased by head popping aliens.
It turns out ALIENS hate Ecco!
There is an alien queen at the end.. you have to kill it.... it is hard.
I hate you ecco (but i cant stop thinking about you)
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