I’ve been playing computer fishing games for about as long as I’ve owned a computer and throughout the years I’ve played plenty of them. Gone fishin’ from Amtex is one of my favorites and the box I baught it in was a small fishing case with a detailed map of the bay of Quinty where the game is played out.

You start the game by creating your angler and apart from naming him (there’s no female in this game) you can select from three difficulty levels as wel as three luck levels. The levels affect how easy you can catch big fish. After that you can select the weather conditions in three categories namely sun/rain, temperature and wind. Each has an impact on where the fish are going to be so experiment on the settings. After making all the selections you arrive at the fishing lodge where you can go in to see the largest catches and talk to a local angler or you can go into the shop to get your tackle. You can pick from a large number of tackle as well as live bait but you can only carry a limited amount so you have to pick the ones you like the most.

After getting into your boat you can directly start fishing as the lodge is right next to a hotspot but you can also take your boat to another location on the very large map. There is a saying that goes: 90 percent of the fish are located in 10 percent of the water, basically meaning that if you need to be in the right place or you won’t catch anything. Looking at the map there are about 15 hotspots where various species of fish can be caught. The different species are definately a big plus in this game as apart from the standard species of bass in most game you can also catch small species like crappie, perch and sunfish as well as larger ones like pike, catfish and even the rare musky.

You can see if there are a large number of fish located near you by looking at the radar and if the place is good you can cast out your lure. You can set things like drag and speed of winding which is important because you have to keep the lure moving at it’s optimum speed shown in the speed-o-meter. Other gauges show you the depth of the water, your line tention and how much line is out.

I really like this game because it does things very well the way a fishing game should do. There was supposed to be competitions played with it as well called the Amtex derby but unfortunately it never took place. Still this remains the fishing game I have played to most to this day so if you’re into that I suggest you check it out quick.

Overal rating: 9.5/10

Erde Kaiser

This game was released for one system here are some notes:

DOS Released in 1994.
Game has been tested but not completed on a 286 PC.
You need to edit a file called gfish.cfg on the lines where it says: D:\GONEFISH , this line tells the game what drive it’s on so change it to wherever you put it. It’s a DOS game though so put it in the root to make sure it works (that means not in another folder).
Date added Apr-11-2005 19:09
Name Gone fishin
Developer Amtex
Publisher Amtex
First released 1994
Genre Simulation