There are a lot of games for the NES and most of them follow the same principle. Complete stages, fight a boss, and win the game.

Jaws on the other hand, was a surprise in terms of mechanics and playstyle. It follows an RPG like style, in which you collect shells to powerup your little fishing boat, preparing you for the final battle with Jaws himself. I thought this was pretty advanced for the time, especially for the NES.

You have a world map on which you can just sail around. Every so often, you get caught in an encounter and play a mini game in a different screen, in which you dive on the ocean floor, avoiding (or shooting) enemies and collect shells. All enemies are some form of wildlife like jellyfish, and smaller sharks. You sail back and forth between ports, in which you can trade in your shells to increase your power meter. You do this multiple times, wait for the encounter with Jaws to happen, shoot his ass, and win the game.

Every so often, you play the same mini game again, only this time, it turned into some kind of bonus stage. In this bonus stage, you fly a plane and freaking nuke the ocean and its inhabitants with bombs that you drop. The sole reason for this is to obliterate as much wildlife as possible and collect as many shells as you can.

In terms of the 8-bit graphics, it looks alright. There is enough detail and color in the world map and the diving stages and the animations work well enough. The sound is also decent, although nothing special.

Jaws is innovative for its time, like I mentioned, but it gets repetitive very soon. You sail around, wait to be hit by some aggressive jellyfish, play the ocean stage, go back, rinse and repeat. Also, when you already collected many, many shells, and are ready to trade them in, you can only get one power level at a time from each port. This means going back and forth in the same, boring routine to the two ports, just to get the meter up. When you are constantly hindered by the encounters on your way, this gets annoying fast.

When you finally reach the maximum (or good enough) power level, you are ready to face Jaws. However, it is pure chance if you are going to find him. You recognize an encounter with Jaws by the overly large grey fin that sticks out of the water when you sail your little boat. Sometimes, this can take minutes and minutes.

Normally, when you encounter him earlier, you just swim past him and pray he does not hit you, but with the power meter at max, you are placed in the final, iconic scene with the harpoon and the boat. Jaws swims up to you, sometimes sticking his head out of the water, granting you an opportunity to strike. The only problem with this endgame stage, is the hit detection. You point your little stick right at him, but many times, your attack misses. As far as I know, it is pure chance, or you need to know exactly which 8 bit pixel you need to aim at.

Anyway, Jaws was fun for what it is, I finished it in a rush of nostalgia and had a good time.

Another game in the long line of NES movie titles from dreaded LJN, Jaws is one of the most boring games I have ever played in my life.

You drive around your boat on a small overworld map. Along the way, you "hit something" which puts you into a battle scene in the water. After fighting off jelly fish, string rays and baby sharks (baby shark, do do do dodo do do, sorry, couldn't resist), you collect shells, starfish and crabs. Each have different benefits. Shells act as currency/money, starfish make you swim faster, and crabs add points to your score, which can help you gain extra lives.

Every once in a while, a fin comes out of the water. If you hit it, you get to battle Jaws! But don't get too excited. Early on, you will be very weak, and you will be lucky to knock two life bars off his energy meter.

So how do you get stronger? Easy. You drive your boat back and forth between two harbors. Doing this upgrades your boat, adding items such as a submarine, and making you stronger. So you do this over. And over. And over again.

It's so boring! I mean, I hated Friday the 13th, but at least that had some variation to it. This is so repetitive, and I'm ok with repetitive if it's an arcade classic like Pac-Man, but with a game like this, it's just painful.

Another LJN turd to avoid.