Nintendo’s Wii games console comes with a special controller called a Wiimote, which you wave about like a crazed conductor to direct your actions on screen.

It’s meant to make everything from baseball to shooting feel more realistic for gamers. To make Endless Ocean more realistic you’d have to play it whilst a friend chucked occasional buckets of water over your head. (Although there’s nothing to stop you sitting on your couch in flippers.)

A diving simulation, Endless Ocean is about as far from the usual frenetic video game violence as you could imagine. And that’s no bad thing according to (qualified diver) Ellie Gibson of reviews site Eurogamer:

Diving controls are a simple matter of pointing where you want to go and pressing a button to swim there; a quick flick executes an about turn. You can then press buttons and shake the remote to examine and interact with fish and other sea life, take photographs [...] and grab treasure from the sea bed. Sorry, not treasure – items of cultural value and anthropological interest.

Endless Ocean is simple to the point of being quite dull, and certainly no masterpiece. But sometimes all a game needs to do is offer you something different, and it’s an honest relief to play something that doesn’t shout in your ear, set any time limits, or feature a single explosion; a game whose raison d’etre is just beauty and peace. Playing this game is almost like taking a holiday from gaming. If you can live with that paradox – and if you can find it reasonably cheap – it’s worth dipping a toe in these calm, blue waters.

Would-be armchair divers can read the rest of Eurogamer’s Endless Ocean review, or check out this Youtube video.

Further reading:

1. $295 to dive into the Baltimore Aquarium
2. Google Ocean confirmed with Google Earth 5.0
3. Deep sea coral reef found off Tasmania

Only a few days into looking for news for AquaDaily, and it’s already becoming apparent that ‘man snorkels in a fish tank’ is a favourite newspaper story.

The New York Daily News is the latest to get in on the action, reporting on Scott Jones, a man who appears to have the ideal job from where I’m sitting this grey day (and enviably taut abdominals, too ).

The Daily News reports:

Jones holds the title of marine technician with the 10-year-old boutique company City Aquarium. He’s one of the lucky New Yorkers who, even in the coldest part of winter, live on an island of equatorial bliss. Any given day, he is up to his elbows – or in over his head – tending to tropical fish, some the pets of the rich and famous.

Who hasn’t got wet in the line of fishkeeping? What fishkeeper wouldn’t trade their cubicle for, well, one made of glass?

On the other hand, who likes doing water changes? And Jones really does water changes:

The aquatic room service he provides includes 3,000 new gallons of synthetic seawater every two weeks. The water is created – salted and heated – in an enormous tank in the hotel’s basement, where 300 gallons can be ready in 45 minutes.

How many leaky carpet-threatening buckets does it take to shift 3,000 gallons?

Further reading:

1. Reef Central Tank of the Month January 2008
2. How to get a job as a deep sea biologist
3. New York Aquarium threatened by budget cuts

Okay, this is a bit of a luxury when you can holiday in the Red Sea from here in the UK from under £300 (provided you can live with the CO2 guilt.)

But I can think of worse ways to spend $295 than diving in the 260,000-US gallon Baltimore Aquarium.

The Washington Post reports:

The Saturday afternoon operation is run by Atlantic Edge, a scuba school and dive shop in Gaithersburg, and supervised by John Harman, the cheerful company co-founder and veteran instructor who made a big splash a few years back by getting married underwater in the Atlantic Coral Reef tank. He and Abbe Harman, his partner in total-immersion matrimony, have been volunteer divers at the National Aquarium for nearly two decades.

There are rays galore in the tank, and I can see batfish, Seargent Majors, snappers and an angelfish in the photo, too. (Your ids in the comments please!)

And how about a legless turtle for a dive buddy?

Calypso, an amputee sea turtle the size of a beer keg, gets along nicely on three flippers. She’s gregarious to a fault. Indeed, on the summer dive, she apparently became intrigued by the color of one diver’s gear and kept giving him reptilian head-butts until he had rotated a full 360 degrees.

US-based readers might want to check out the Atlantic Edge website for more details. Send us a postcard if you take the plunge?

Further reading:

1. Go dive a reef on your Nintendo console
2. University of Queensland measures energy used by baby turtles heading seaward
3. If you can’t go diving, visit The Right Blue instead