Video Games

April 15, 2010 | DR Studios

Back in my college days i played a fair number of Japanese “dating simulators”.  The style pushed by these games tends to be still image graphics with walls and walls of expositional text.  Occasionally you make a choice.  It’s sort of like a Choose your own adventure book.  High School Dreams is sort of an American take on the same basic concept.  This game has a fairly rough development history according to Wikipedia.  Originally developed by Eidos, it was dumped when SquareEnix bought out Eidos.  After being dumped, DR Studios went on to develop the title themselves before being released on the GreenMan Gaming download service.  Several sites such as IGN still list this game as canceled despite being released in early 2010.

Originally I had picked this up because I wanted to try out Greenman’s service and it was the cheapest thing on the site that wasn’t a DLC, being on sale for around a dollar.  After playing through I have to say I was rather pleased with the game itself.  You play as the “new girl” in town and must navigate through the ins and outs of the High School social network.  The game pushes itself as a dating simulator style game and there is a “main plot” of courting one of the 6 main male character in order to get a date for the Prom, though the prom occurs only a few weeks into the school year so it’s more of a Homecoming event than anything.

The game has much much more depth than simply trying to find a date for the prom.  It actually has so many concurrent social mechanisms running at once things become a bit overwhelming at times.  I will say that it is impossible to actually manage to “go out” with all of the guys at once time during one play through.  For starters, your clothing options all influence what different folks think of you, so you’ll never be able to impress everyone at once.  Even if you try rotating the wardrobe, there is the problem of needing to buy more clothes to fulfill every option.  There are several mini game jobs to play to earn cash but this will eat into the time you have to interact with everyone. 

There is also the basic underlying idea of interacting with the world eating up time.  As you talk to random NPCs you can learn different bits of gossip, then you can turn around and spread this gossip.  This is sometimes necessary to help keep yourself from gaining a poor reputation.  There are also numerous magnets hidden around to collect, though they do not serve any purpose as far as I could tell.  In order to help better your friendship with your best female companion you’ll have to have the occasional sleep over which can be made more beneficial by updating your room’s furniture. 

In short, being a new girl in High School is a lot more work than I’d ever expected.

The game is not without it’s short comings.  I have my suspicions that some of these shortcoming were spawned from the game’s rocky development cycle.  Basically, they lost their publisher and budget and had to cut some of the ambition out of this title.  For example, there are a few additional male characters that seem like they were originally intended to be options during the dating sequences.  The game itself is also somewhat buggy.  The path finding mechanisms are iffy sometimes for the NPCs.  The game itself takes an eternity to load, at least it did on my wimpy laptop, though once the initial load is over it runs pretty briskly.  By “eternity” I’m talking at LEAST ten minutes once you leave the title screen, probably more like fifteen.

The game also lacks a lot of overlap between the characters that really could flesh out the world.  For example, you can end up “dating” 3 or 4 guys at once and no one seems to notice or care.  You never seem to get a “what the hell I thought we were friends”.  Also, despite that I ended up very high on the scale with the nerdy photographer guy, yet had only done one favor for the class clown guy, there were suddenly rumors about how pathetic I was for going out with the class clown.  Really?  I barely interacted with the guy.

This brings up another point.  Every one of your dating options is a blatant stereotype, though fortunately, you do tend to find that they are more than their stereotype would suggest, though not MUCH more.  There is the pretty boy, who won’t even speak to you; the jock who is obsessed with basketball; the nerdy photography obsessed guy, who ignores his best friend who is a girl for you; there is the lonely goth kid who spends all his time reading and indoors; and finally there is the “token black guy” who is into music.  It tends to make selection on things like gift really obvious from the start.  Also disappointing, you almost never interact with anyone outside of the school itself other than when you go on a date.  You pretty much never just happen to run into someone at the mall or the beach or the park.  The interactions are somewhat limited as well, unless you’re at a point for a special event, you get the same idle chit chat whether a guy is totally indifferent to your or if he’s totally in love with you.

There are also some issues a bit with pacing.  Thankfully, the learning part of the school day is totally superfluous.  You get up, get dressed, go tot school, the clock jumps to 3 PM.  The clock runs very quickly though, which is frustrating when you’re trying to complete some fetch quest for one of the many NPCs.  On the other hand, the game tends to plod along before getting to any level of a resolution.  After about 2 weeks of in game time, I was wondering when this game’s plot was going to go somewhere.  It barely gets off the ground unfortunately.  You do fetch quests and pick the “best” chat choices until you get asked to the prom.  Prom culminates in a series of mini games to see if you can win being Prom King and Queen.

The Prom mini games are mostly rehashes of the job mini games.  These actually are surprisingly varied and reasonably fun.  Each has 3 difficulty levels though the difficulty is more based on not missing things more than actually getting more difficult.  There are a few match the music notes DDR style games.  There is a matching game at the Laundromat, the ice cream parlor has the most challenge where you must quickly fulfill orders while keeping your supply of Ice Cream stocked.  The park ranger has you plant flowers in the flower bed though I’m not sure if there is any way to actually lose this mini game.  Completing mini games on the higher levels also earns special outfits that generally have a high appeal to one of the 6 boys you can court.  Doing the Cheerleading game for example will net you a cheerleader outfit which the Jock loves.

The overall result is a huge mixed bag.  Maybe I’m just viewing it from the wrong perspective, not really being anywhere near the target audience for this title.  It’s extremely ambitious in it’s presentation but at the same time it’s lacking some key interactions to make the world feel rich while at the same time coming off as a bit rushed.  On the other hand, I’m sure my daughter will love playing this game over and over just for the dress up aspect.

High School Dreams is available here on Greenman Gaming.

Tale of Tales | March 18th, 2009

Ok, so I did a review a while back of The Graveyard, also by Tale of Tales.  If the graveyard is essentially a pointless tech demo, The Path is the final product.  The Path takes the story of Little red Riding Hood and creeps it out into a spooky horror story.  You must navigate each of 6 sisters through the woods to meet with Grandmother at her house.  The only instructions you get from the game are to “Stay on the Path”.  The path is just that, a path running through the forest from your starting location to grandmothers home.  It is straight and empty.  You can very much simply stay on the path The Graveyard style and walk “up” to grandmother’s house.

The fun and real point comes when you leave the path.  For in the forest is where the wolves lurk.

The problem is that the wolves are more or less all metaphorical.  I have read several other reviews and analysis of this plot that for the most part, each of the girls goes through some sort of ravaging or rape, which is metaphorical for the wolves of the forest.  There is no sex in this game mind you, anything sexual is merely implied and any point where it would occur, the screen simply fades out.  Each of the girls has a special location in the forest which will trigger some sort of event.  For example, one girl will encounter a man camping in the forest.  Another encounters some sort of spirits in the middle of a lake.  These encounters essentially all end badly” and your character will wape up in front of Grandmother’s House battered and wounded.  Once entering Grandmother’s House you are treated to a bunch of random “creepy stuff” in an on rails FPS perspective.  Depending on items collected and events passed you will get added bonus rooms to this end sequence.

After completing the trip with a girl you return to the start and get to repeat the trip with another girl.

I get the point of the game.  There’s sub tones of keeping yourself on the straight path and obeying and not trusting strangers in the woods.  On the other hand, you get zero points for staying on the path and going to Grandmother’s home.  I do somewhat appreciate the intrinsic artistic metaphor of it all to a point. 

The issues on the concept almost all lie in the presentation.  The biggest flaw is the plodding pace that the girls travel.  It’s pretty much as slow as the grandmother in The Graveyard.  There is a run option when you hold shift but irritatingly, as you run, the screen shifts to a more top down angle which obscures your perspective and makes it difficult to see where you’re going.  I’m sure this was done to enhance the metaphor of running blindly into danger or some bull shit but there is only so much crap you can throw at a person before the experience gets ruined.

There are also other issues such as unclear direction for where to go.  You can unlock a map but by the time you’ve collected enough flowers to do so, you’re likely going to have completed the game and who cares.  Navigating blindly and being “lost” is kind of fun for the first girl or two but eventually the player will get the point and want to just push what little plot there is onward.

Which brings up another issue.  The plot is pretty vague.  Once again, there is only so much that Artsy can fill before the person playing, or more accurately, in this case, viewing, will take before they want some sort of explanation.  The biggest oddity is the Forrest girl which wanders around near the player the whole game.  There isn’t much explanation as to who she is, there are implications that she is the Grandmother, or that she is the forest spirit or that she is the “real wolf”.  Who knows, who cares.

I will say one thing for this game, it goes on sale occasionally.  While I personally don’t feel it’s worth bothering with at it’s $10 regular price point, it’s probably an ok play if you want an interesting artsy game for a couple of bucks when it’s on sale.

The Path can be found here on Steam.

Tale of Tales | March 21, 2008

I’m going to be up front here.  This isn’t much of a “review”.  It is more of a commentary on a “game”.  The graveyard is not a game in any real traditional sense.  Even Universe Sandbox, which is more of a simulator, still has some gamey aspects to it.  The only real gamey aspects here are the fact that it runs on a PC and is a 3D rendering with basic controls.

There is no real plot, there is only one character, unless you count the birds in the background.  You play as an Old Woman.  Your goal is go guide her through a Graveyard to a park bench, then guide her out of the Graveyard after a little cut scene song.  You can experience all of this yourself for free fortunately, the demo is free, though there is a paid version available.  The only difference is that in the paid version, each time you play the game, there is a chance that the old woman may die while sitting on the bench.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to quit the game once the woman has died, pressing escape only brings up the menu describing how to play the game.

It’s hard to push judgment on something like this.  It delivers everything it promises to be, the real issue is it doesn’t promise to BE anything.  The presentation is fairly nice.  It’s a really interesting tech demo.  I also plan to play through Tale of Tale’s title The Path, which seems to be a bit more involved, so there’s some promise that The Path will at least have a decent presentation.

Maybe I just don’t “get it”.  Even if it were meant to be some sort of statement about dying to help you reflect on life or whatever, there isn’t much to go on to feel sympathetic towards the Old Woman.  The song during the interlude is corny and weird and doesn’t help present a very emotional atmosphere to encourage very many deep thoughts on life and death. 

The Graveyard reminds me of going to a museum a bit.  You see a hunk of twisted metal called “art”.  It’s supposed to be meaningful and representative and metaphorical and make you thing but in the end it’s mostly just a hunk of metal.  Not even the kind of metal hunks that look like roosters made from pitchforks or wreckage from a car or anything, just a hunk of twisted metal.

The Graveyard and it’s demo are both available on Steam here or via the Tale of Tales website.