“Friends, now is the time to calm the waves we have stirred.” said Marc Whitten, GM of Xbox Live, to his colleagues after weeks of his service being plagued by outages and inoperability. He continued, “We’re going to give them a free game, we’re going to give them Undertow.”

WHAT GAME IS LANCASTER PLAYING?

I don’t really know who Lancaster is. He’s either Admiral Shit of
Colonization Mountain or Captain Fuck of Piratopia. Whoever he is,
he’s playing a game and your character, again, I’m not really sure who
he is, makes sure you know this by repeating it a dozen times during
one of the campaign missions. Anyway, Lancaster is playing a game,
either with a Pirate, or with your boss for the first few missions.
Somehow, their game seems to cause a beef between Captain Nemo, who
just calls himself Nemo now, and some mermen from Atlantis. I never
really finished the game, or bothered finding out who the characters
really were. I have played enough to figure out that there’s going to
be some sort of truce between I don’t know, your character, Nemo’s
son, and some as yet unseen merlady, probably. It doesn’t really
matter.

In Undertow, as in many recent games, the fortunes of war are decided
by standing next to flags in hopes of earning more points. The entire
single player game consists of floating on points hoping that a
miniscule diver you can’t really see doesn’t kill you with 5 shots
from a harpoon gun even though you’re in a giant submarine 30 times
his size. You have some computer players to help you, but I think
they’re played by sea monkeys because you never really see them and
they never really do anything.

WHY IS THIS DOLPHIN SHOOTING AT ME?

That’s a quote from someone I played the game with. We tried
multiplayer one time. There were 4 of us and 6 computers. Having
played the game before, I figured I would be at an advantage. Instead,
I found myself in the same boat as the 2 guys who’d never played. The
action was hard to figure out because, even on a 42″ HDTV playing at
1080P, I still have a hard time seeing anything smaller than the
minisub. As if the size of the characters wasn’t enough, there are all
sorts of rock formations and bits of kelp in this 2.5D landscape that
obscure the enemy. Maybe that’s why I can never see my own team.
Anyway, multiplayer is more of the campaign. You run to bases and sit
on them, hoping you get the chance to drop a depth charge or shoot
whatever is coming before you die. The only added benefit is that you
get to converse with other people as mystified as you are.

It’s hard to mention Undertow at all without mentioning the
circumstances under which the bulk of its players will have gotten it.
The game was given to us as appeasement for Xbox Live not ever being
technically down over the holidays. Even the AIs in the game can
figure out that the only reason it was given to us is that the game is
the same kind of token as Yaris: given to people because no one in
their right mind would ever buy it.