NOCLIP Pocket E98 - Pay the Fun Tax - Ecco the Dolphin

Podcast to the shelled ones. Welcome back to the podcast! Today
we’re talking about Ecco the Dolphin, a side scrolling adventure
game and a real classic of the Genesis era. Ecco is a weird game in
a lot of ways, the most obvious of which is the fact that it’s a
game in which you play as a dolphin and all the surprisingly fluid
movement that comes with that. Moving around in this game is
surprisingly cool for the time, with the ability to swim very
quickly around the map and jump out of water. This theme also
serves well for other mechanics, including a breath mechanic to add
some time pressure to levels and sonar which creates maps on the
fly, both of which are really unique and play into the unique
aspects of the game. The other reason the game is weird is that,
without spoiling it, it does go to places you might not expect from
a game about a dolphin. The fact that there is a narrative twist
and a bunch of these cool and flavorful mechanics almost makes up
for the fact that this game is an extremely unintuitive maze game.
Maybe one of the best examples of a game that is fun to play but
not fun to beat, completing levels in Ecco requires you to dodge
randomly placed phasing-through-walls enemies while moving at high
speed and trying to find nooks and/or crannies that contain
crystals, which are just keycards. So it’s a bit hit and miss but
it is one of those retro games that is definitely worth at least
looking into if you’re interested in some of the bigger swings.
We’re going to be talking about how and why the difficulty of the
game is what it is, how unexpected the twist was, and we fit in a
mention of Blackfish because why not. Thank you for joining us
again this week! Ecco got put on the list almost as a joke, but
we’re glad to have actually played it. Such is the whim of the
dice. Were you aware of what this game actually was? Did you play
this when it was a new game? Let us know in the comments or over on
our Discord! This is our last randomly selected game for Pocket, so
we’re moving on to our next theme, a thing no one cares about but
we have no shortage of anyway. Next time, we’re starting a series
of episodes dedicated to DLC and expansions and we’re beginning
with Splatoon 3’s Side Order, so we hope you’ll join us for that!