There’s no question that fishing games are a niche genre. They’ve worn a permanent butt-groove on that “beloved by 5% of all gamers, ignored by everyone else” shelf, right between card-based Civil War tactical sims and those adventure games in which you touch preteen anime girls inappropriately.
Usually, we forgive the world for not giving a crap about fishing games because most of them are boring. Real-world fishing is a zen-like exercise in which minute-long bursts of man vs. nature punctuate hours of man sitting on his duff and probably drinking, and even we who love it have to admit that most fishing games recreate this aspect a little too well. But Sega Bass Fishing isn’t most fishing games- it’s practically a fighting game, an arcade-style tug-of-war whose arena is a lake packed to bursting with the most ravenous lunkers in the virtual sea.
