Playing Seaman is, in essence, just like playing with a digital pet. What you do with Seaman doesn’t generally differ much from day to day (although the things you do vary as Seaman grows and evolves). In the beginning, you basically just control the temperature and air levels, and feed Seaman at first (and finding the right temperature to hatch the egg may require some FAQ or other help if you don’t want to take the trial-and-error route, since the game is spectacularly unhelpful in this procedure). As time goes on, you will also take care of some bugs to feed to Seaman as he grows and you run low on food pellets, but this is not particularly difficult; you just have to remember to do everything regularly. Don’t fret about checking on Seaman every couple hours, Seaman is a pretty hardy creature; the only real way to kill him that I’ve seen is to either TRY (and you do have to try pretty hard) to kill him or just neglect him for an excessive amount of time (we’re talking at least a couple of days).

As a side note, Seaman wasn’t designed to be played for hours on end; thirty minutes to an hour a day should suffice. If you’re looking for a game that provides many straight hours of action and excitement, you’ll want to pass on this one. This is not a game for the impatient or those wanting instant gratification.

The only thing that really sets Seaman apart from other digipet "games" is the fact that you can, on one level or another, communicate with Seaman using the included microphone. The voice recognition is pretty forgiving, and it’s not super-hard to get Seaman to understand you. However, the voice recognition is not as sophisticated or easy to use as Sega would like you to believe. For the most part, Seaman only really understands key words and short phrases (in other words, you can’t speak conversationally with him), and seems to confuse words on several occasions.

Seaman also responds to what you say through the microphone, and his responses range anywhere from the usual "canned" responses to some responses that are actually pretty funny (try saying "English" a few times before Seaman can really speak to get some funny responses). Seaman has a lot of tart and sarcastic sayings, but every Seaman has the same voice (which is rather boring monotone one I might add). Thus you'll discover that Seaman seldomly shows any degree of emotion, a factor that would raise the entertainment value of the game significantly.

Graphically, Seaman is certainly nothing to get excited about. While the graphics get the job done, they really lack a lot of aesthetic quality. Apart from the Seaman and bug models, there’s nothing much to look at. The character models get the job done well, but they certainly aren’t overachieving anything. There’s also no sound apart from water sounds and Seaman’s voice, and they also get the job done, but aren’t going to floor anyone.

As a final note, Seaman has a rather poor interface. It’s easy enough to do everything, the interface is just awkward and full of arcane button-pressing combinations (X+R+L just to feed Seaman?). It’s not maddeningly difficult, but it is rather annoying that the interface could have been done much better than it was. Also, Seaman as a rather horrid method for zooming in that could have been at least a little easier to deal with.

This review may make Seaman sound a lot worse than it actually is, but the fact is that for all the innovation this title introduces, it has just as many flaws as great points. Seaman isn't a BAD game, it just could have been done a lot better in terms of presentation and ease of use. I've kind of been bearing down on the game because I don't want to make this game out to be something it's not, and it's really not much more than just a talking Tamagotchi. If that's cool to you, go ahead and check Seaman out, but if it's not, you'll want to pass it up.

While my impressions have been derived from a week's worth of play, it’s pretty easy to conclude that Seaman isn’t necessarily a game to place on your "must have" list, unless you just REALLY can’t do without a digital pet, or just want a game to mellow out to. Seaman is worthy of a rental, but everyone but the hardcore digital pet-raisers will want to rent this before even thinking about a purchase, just in case they don’t like the taste of Seaman (come on, you knew I was going to make that joke somewhere).

· · · Cynic