The Whale Event

Sometimes you are struck by an urge so great that you have no other choice but to follow through on it. Sometimes, life decides you’re making the right choice, and graciously allows you to follow through and complete that task thrust upon you suddenly. In this instance, that urge is to document the whale from a diving minigame in the Nintendo DS game MySims (for the DS, obviously).

The trend of releasing two very different games on very different platforms under the same name (or at the very least, they were marketed together) is a lost time—a lost art. There was no releasing the same product on different consoles that were roughly equally as powerful to varying degrees of performance, like today. Even the Nintendo Switch, being old and curmudgeonly compared to Playstation and Xbox’s current generational offerings, can play the same game as them, barring graphical polish. This cannot be said of the handhelds of the early 00’s (aughts). The Wii and the DS were from different cliques, yet still still were forced to coexist at Nintendo’s precious lunchroom table.

In order to get the most out of people—scratch that, let’s be honest: kids—game developers would make a game for one platform, and then use the same concepts (and marketing, and graphics, and—) for the other. The other being the DS: a vastly less powerful device than it’s sister the Wii. The games had to be completely different and redesigned, if not for the graphical limitations but the abilities each one had. The Wii has motion controls! The DS has a little touch screen and it’s portable! The other consoles are consoles and they’re not important to this conversation nor did I own them as a kid!

Who knows what the reasoning was for the trend. Seeing a cool, interesting commercial for a game, seeing it had a DS version, getting it, and feeling strange about the lack of what I had seen on the other versions… well, it’s a universal experience for those who had… experienced… it. Was it pressure to reach all audiences? Was it profitable to make two different games out of the same property? Do I really care? The world may never know, except for that last one, where I’m happy to just flat out say I don’t. I am writing this not for a look at the phenomenon of this particular era, but for the very important journey of playing MySims (DS).

MySims (Wii & PC) is a game many people know about. The game itself is a spin-off of The Sims, but just, like, I don’t know, cuter… or something. It uses the famous plumbob. It… uh… it’s got… people in it. They… You know what, I don’t think I want to go in too deep on the background of this either, because the more I do, the more it’s just kind of weird. I’ve watched many YouTubers play the Wii (or PC) version and have fun with it. It’s silly. I know of people who’ve played some of the other games in the MySims series and hold those times fondly in their memory.

No one talks about the original DS game.

Or, in a way that I cared about. I don’t even really like the game or think it’s good. It’s definitely not a bad DS game—I played those—and the cutesy graphics hold up better than the more realistic art style of The Sims franchise proper. I even have my own fond memories of the game. Notably, I remember finally figuring something out: it was in the mountain area in the game, I was inside at a warehouse market while my parents were selling items, and it was the evening. A small scrap of a memory, but enough to where I am transported to that vignette when I think of the game. Memories are how we got here, to this point where I’m writing to you of my findings, and my journey.

I’ve been playing another important and memorable game from my childhood (much more influential to me than MySims (DS), JYSK), which is funnily enough a Wii game: Endless Ocean Blue World. It’s a game about scuba diving. That’s it. Well, that's reductive, but for now, that's the important aspect.

While playing it, my partner began to discuss models—cute animal models in video games, spurred by watching me swim around fish and mammals of the sea. Now, I am a connoisseur of what is cute, and I must admit that if MySims had one defining trait, it would be this:

THE ANIMALS ARE SO CUTE.

They are like pillow-shaped. EA lost so much money not making these into pillow-based merchandi—wait I need to fact check something… Okay, yeah, no: there’s no plushies or pillows of MySims animals. What a crime.

Regardless of the status of officially licensed merchandise, the cuteness cannot be denied. The topic coming up while also playing a scuba diving game made me immediately think of MySims (DS)*. This is because MySims (DS) has a scuba diving minigame where you take pictures of sealife for points. The sealife is very cute of course, and includes creatures such as turtles, manta rays, those vertically-aligned flat-freaks I think are called sunfish, and dolphins. But I, having just passed by a whale and her baby in Endless Ocean, was thinking only of the Whale Event.

*I am annoying about specificity because I can only speak for the DS game. Perhaps the search for the whale was left to me because the model only exists in this game. Do you even scuba dive in other MySims games? I do not know. I was not so lucky to experience these little guys outside the tiny, tiny island world inside my dual-screened device. Alas.

Much like the memory playing in the warehouse market, I had a distinct memory of the majesty of the fleeting Whale Event. Once you reach a certain point, the NPC in charge of facilitating the photography dives informs you that there’s a whale, and that you should get going right away to catch the rare event. It’s something special, something only a DS game can make you feel. It is what I think of when I think of the term “Liminal Space”. The Whale Event is a completely empty ocean, without any coral or seaweed or rocks that other levels of the minigame might contain, and a giant whale coming out of the render-distance fog, swimming past you, and then disappearing once more with the slow sense of weight that you might expect from a whale. The whale is the only thing to do—you take pictures of it, you watch it leave, and then you get a lot of points and money because it’s a whale. That’s the Whale Event.

I remembered it, enough details about it, and the game it was from, so I assumed I would just look up the MySims whale to show my partner and that would be that. Yet, I could not find a picture, a video, anything visual of my dear, dear whale. Only a few sparse walkthroughs mentioning the Whale Event.

I felt distressed. Bothered. I stopped playing Endless Ocean to use all the search techniques I knew to find evidence of the whale. I wanted to know. Eventually I totally grabbed the completely real physical copy of MySims (DS) that I still owned from my childhood and definitely never ever sold and placed it in my 3DS (that I still do have. It doesn’t have a joystick anymore). I would have to gather it myself.

I thought it wouldn’t be that difficult. It technically wasn’t. But I still sat there, several hours in, thinking how boring and sad this game was. It was kind of bad. I remember it being kind of bad as a child, even then comparing it to others such as Animal Crossing Wild World which had so much more depth and life. I ended up using the time I spent playing it to reflect on things and be mediative. There were so many games I held dear in my youth, but the reason they were so great when they really weren't was my imagination. That's why I'm playing Endless Ocean Blue World again, because it was the first game I recall that really drove me to go beyond the confines of a limited area composed of polygons and pixels.

But, nevertheless, I have given us the gift of a whale. Behold.