Freddi Fish: Kelp Seed Mystery (Wii) Walkthrough

Yep, it's the relatively forgotten Wii port of Freddi Fish today. This happened as a result of Atari's lame attempt to make Humongous relevant again in the mid-2000s. I'm frankly not surprised in the least they went bankrupt after all the stupid things they did.

Here's the Wii port of Freddi Fish: Kelp Seed Mystery. Although a lot of people like to blame Majesco for changing the title, that actually was not their decision; in fact, the changed title goes back to a year before the Wii ports were even released. There was a small handful of retail re-releases in 2007, which all had the changed titles (and something else that's often overlooked -- Freddi Fish 2 and Pajama Sam 2 were also released with changed titles, being "Haunted Schoolhouse Mystery" and "Thunder and Lightning", respectively). So, although the changed title is often attributed to the Wii port, that's not technically correct.

As for the port itself...the game is almost entirely unchanged. Being sourced from the 2007 PC port, we did get the ability to skip the movement scenes and the colorized item cursors which is a plus if you're used to the '94 or '98 PC versions, though it's not a change that was made specifically for the Wii port even though some people say otherwise. Also, bizarrely enough, the game runs in Slow Machine Mode for whatever reason (this mode was enabled if the game found your video card to be too slow in the PC version). This means the inventory bubbles don't pop and many of the background effects are missing, such as the water ripples in the cave where Gabby is stuck. I have no idea why they couldn't be bothered to fix this, considering the Wii is way more powerful than any computer that was released in 1994.

Oh, and the elephant in the room...the game was sped up. I...don't even understand why this was done. What was the point of this? Everything looks like it moves on steroids. Did they think it looked smoother or something? It's incredibly distracting and it bothers the heck out of me. In fact you barely even have time to read the credits because of it. Why the HECK did they think this was a good idea? And there's small things like the fact that the port only runs in 480i with zero support for 480p (I have NEVER seen a Wii game outside of this that doesn't support it. It would have taken maybe two seconds to add!).

On top of that, that's not even the stupidest thing about this port. I don't know how many of you know the whole story behind this, but here goes...Atari contracted Majesco to do the porting work, who then outsourced the work to Mistic Software. Mistic had every tool they could have possibly needed to do the work. They had the game assets, the source code, everything.

So what did they choose to do?

They literally just stuck a ScummVM build into the game and called it a day.

I'm serious.

...okay, besides being lazy as all heck, they managed to mess up further. First off, they were paid to port the game code, not do the lazy thing (by which I mean the employee wages matched the labor it would have taken to port the whole game. They basically slacked off on their job). Second off...they ENTIRELY FAILED TO MAKE A SINGLE MENTION THAT SCUMMVM WAS EVEN IN THE GAME. That's a violation of the GPL (which is what ScummVM is licensed to...if you don't know what it is, it's not important, just think of it as a copyright violation). It's a long story and complicated, but all of the alternative options were essentially not options in some form or another. Here, read sev's blog post on this if you want all the detail. http://sev-notes.blogspot.com/2009/06...

The games were pulled from store shelves and are somewhat troubling to find nowadays, but does it really matter that much? The game was virtually unchanged (aside from the developers sticking their names into the credits, which you barely even have time to read anyway), and it sure didn't seem like it helped a lot in renewing interest in these games. The laziness of the ports, coupled with not even being done legally was a good example to me of why Atari was so awful with these properties when they were in their hands, and I'm not surprised at all they ended up having to surrender them after declaring bankruptcy. While I may not like Tommo a lot (actually I could go on for another rant about them), they have done a whole lot more with these properties as a whole and having them on Steam was a pretty major step in the right direction. Plus they seem to be doing at least a little more than just having sporadic retail re-releases that you'll find in the bargain bin, so that's also a plus.

As for these ports though...they were mostly a thing that happened and just came and went. However, I'll be darned if I didn't enjoy making another walkthrough of a Humongous game just for old time's sake. Can you believe it's been 5 years since I did my initial wave of Humongous game walkthroughs? I certainly can't.

Enjoy the video!