I, like I'd assume most people here did, bought my share of shitty games as a kid. Recently, I made an effort to revisit them. Most of them sucked and were not worth discussing, one of them stuck out as weirdly good: Bassin's Black Bass with Hank Parker.
There's only one mode, a sequence of four levels which take the form of a fishing tournament, where you catch five bass in a given time period, with the top three participants advancing to the next round. You drive a boat around a lake with an isometric view, then cast via a split-screen behind the back view that gives you an overhead view of the water and lures. Rinse and repeat until you catch your fill.
A lot has been said about game feel, and how little tricks can make the act of playing a game satisfying, and Bassin's Black Bass is very adept at this, choosing to focus on the act of reeling a fish in rather than luring it. Hooking a fish is easy - pick the right lure (an optional fishing guide explains proper lure choices if you haven't played the game before, which is surprisingly forward thinking for a SNES game in general, let alone a fishing game), wiggle it in the general vicinity of a fish, then mash down when the fish bites. But reeling in a fish, especially a large one, is a dance between multiple mechanics, juggling the need to reel in wire, prevent the line from breaking, and keeping the hook set. The line's tension is shown as a graph between you and the fish, and if the fish's graph fills, the game beeps - too many beeps, and your line snaps and you lose the fish and your lure. Don't keep enough tension on the line, and the lure's icon starts to shake more - if the lure shakes too much, the fish shakes free. Juggling these two mechanics is legitimately tense and exciting, and the game does a great job of introducing these mechanics with easier, smaller fish early on, giving you the knowledge to properly fight and land the larger fish of the late game.
There are some rough spots - the fact that certain cover has hitboxes makes landing fish in certain areas (like rocks or reeds) much more tedious than it needs to be, and fish AI can occasionally be perplexing - but Starfish/Hot B managed to put together their fishing game formula very effectively in this one game, and I still enjoy revisiting it.
As an interesting side note, American Bass Challenge for the GBA is largely the same game mechanically (it's even by the same developer), but loses all of the game feel that makes Bassin's Black Bass noteworthy. It feels like a bad NES port of a good arcade game, awful translation and all. I feel like playing the two back to back is an interesting case study in how the same mechanics, on paper, can go right or wrong.
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