I was way too excited for the new My Boyfriend game. I anticipated all the fun of Sim dating, plus my favorite guilty pleasure (changing my avatar’s clothes every five minutes), without all that tedious eating and sleeping and meter-watching of actual Sims. I really wanted to like it. I wasn’t lying in angry-feminist wait for objectionable themes, I wanted to blog about frothy dialogue, cute outfits and imaginary boyfriends.
But it was awful.
The game opens with you and your best friend arriving at a resort full of fun activities and hot guys! Unfortunately, the dialogue is stilted, partly because it’s EFL, and partly because I hoped for witty banter. There’s a lot of clicking ok, only “ok” is an awkward agreement. The dialogue was so awkward that I couldn’t always tell who was supposed to be an attractive possible friend and who was a mean girl to be thwarted with my killer wits. I could tell which guys were potential boyfriends, though, because the minor NPCs only had one line to say.
As you walk around the resort, white stars appear over activatable items, and you have the option to participate in different resort activities. Whether you choose to relax in the sun, rent waterskiis, or swim in the pool, you don’t play a minigame or even watch a little cutscene animation. You watch a clock tick. I’m not exaggerating. You watch a pink clock tick. Um, when does the fun start?
Other activities do involve minigames. These are activated by talking to an NPC. I’m usually a big fan of minigames (see also: all my recent hidden objects game reviews), but these minigames were awful. AWFUL. We’re talking incomprehensible directions, repetitive gameplay and bizarrely uneven difficultly levels. For Step Aerobics, you need to click the right color in the right order five times to complete level one. For Kareoke, you need to click the right color at the right time FORTY EIGHT times to complete level one. Wait, one is more difficult than the next by a factor of ten?
Your character can also experiment with makeup, but the extremely limited choices forbade either adorable looks or hilarious fashion trainwrecks. (If you think makeup doesn’t lend itself well to a videogame, check out the facial minigame in Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting To Danger for a makeup game done right, or Sims 3 for recreational avatar decoration.)
I really wanted to like My Boyfriend, but we have to break up. This just isn’t working out.
Resorting To Danger, by Her Interactive, is the second in the Nancy Drew Dossier series, following Lights, Camera, Curses!. This time, Nancy is investigating a series of bombs at the Redondo, a rejuvenation clinic for the stars. The bombs are more mess than death, containing pie filling or ladybugs, but Nancy’s still got to defuse the bombs and find the mad bomber without alarming the wealthy celeb patrons in for a facial or mud bath.
Download a free trial of the upcoming Nancy Drew Dossier game, Resorting To Danger! The full game comes out in shops and online on August 25th. (I’ll have a Resorting To Danger! game review on my blog then)
After Women’s Murder Club: A Darker Shade Of Grey, and Women’s Murder Club: Death In Scarlet comes a new WMC, Women’s Murder Club: Crimes of Passion, this time for the Nintendo DS and DSi. I think the portable DS system, with the stylus-driven games, is perfect for casual gaming, and I’m seeing more and more story-based casual games coming out. I’ve been carrying the Sims (or Sims Castaway!) in my purse, and I also saw a Nancy Drew game for the DS the other day.
From the Women’s Murder Club: Crimes of Passion press release:
“When I dreamed up the ladies of the Women’s Murder Club, I knew they were women of action; women on the go,” said James Patterson. “I never dreamed they could come to life like they have in the Nintendo DS version. This new game gives fans a chance to become a member of the Women’s Murder Club anytime, anywhere.”
And by “anytime, anywhere” I think he means “while waiting at the airport”.
I was lucky enough to get a look at some screenshots from the upcoming game. I had to include this one, because there just aren’t enough science-themed puzzles in games targeted to women!
Obligatory hidden objects minigame. It works well in a mystery-solving game, but I just don’t see what’s fun about squinting at the screen.
Nintendo DSi users will get a special feature that uses the camera, (can’t wait to see how they integrate that) but the game will also be available for the regular DS.
Subsoap(TM) (www.subsoap.com), an up and coming developer of
casual games, today announced the launch of Faerie Solitaire.
The game is a fantasy-theme casual card game that’s full of adventure,
mystery, and wonder. Featuring 360 exciting levels, including Hidden
Object mini games, 8 worlds to play through, and hundreds of hours
of gameplay entertainment. Faerie Solitaire is the next triple-A
casual title, and is available exclusively at Subsoap.com.
Rescuing Lost Faeries
In Faerie Solitaire players will travel across the land of Avalon
in search of magical faeries who have been trapped by some
mysterious force. A move away from what is currently popular in
the casual space, Faerie Solitaire’s strong production values
and compelling gameplay will surely please solitaire fans.
Is it just me, or does that sentence make it sound like other casual games have no production value and boring gameplay? I’m not saying there aren’t a bunch of dull match-3s floating around the internet, but I’ve played some amazing casual games, like Funky Farm 2, Crayon Physics, and Nancy Drew: Lights, Camera, Curses!, just to name a few recent ones that had me addicted. I hope Faerie Solitaire will be one of them!
Subsoap also plans to launch a new casual gaming portal sometime this year.
In January, I’ve got a couple new reviews in the works (including the hidden-objects Mystery Case Files: Castle Ravenhearst). What games would you like to see here? What games are you planning to play this month?
Jenni Lada at Gamertell has an editorial on how games encourage kids to read. As a teacher and a gamer, I’m always pleased to see someone focusing on the positives of gaming. Videogames, like anything else that entertains kids, can be a useful classroom tool.
Games based on popular books also help encourage kids to read the source material. The Harry Potter series of games often only presents a small fraction of the story from the books and, if a child plays the game and watches the movie, he or she may then be compelled to move on to the books to discover subtle nuances not found in the other adaptation.
Lada makes some great points. Jenni, if you’re reading, bonus points for seeing manga as a stepping
stone towards reading for pleasure, not going the other way, towards a generation of illiterates who can barely spell out “POW!” and “BAM!” Still, she seems a bit caught up in using game and movie spinoffs to point kids back at books. This isn’t wrong, but I think she’s skipped over all the great text-based games and story games that intergrate playing and reading. Yeah, I’m old, I remember when computer games were text. The older Adventure or Zork games were essentially choose-your-own-adventure books.
I recently played Nancy Drew: Lights, Camera, Curses! and part of the dialogue was remembering what you’d seen earlier, and choosing that option. Even games that aren’t quizzing players on their recall require reading of mission descriptions, journals, RPG clues and so many other things. Unfortunately, players determined not to read, say, WarCraft quest text can just click OK and go kill things, but this is where Lada’s point comes back. Quite a few of the hack-and-slash RPGs have spawned spinoff novels.
What makes Nancy Drew: Lights, Camera, Curses!a
girls’ game is the female protagonist. It’s not pink, it’s not cutesy,
there are no magic animal friends, there is no shopping. Let me repeat
that in case you were skimming. This game is not pink.
I want to call up the developers at Her and make them all cookies.
(Note to self: Consider revising “baking for feminism” stance) I got
the chance to beta-test Lights…, and I was so pleased to see
that Her did not take an existing game, change the racecars into pink
fluffy bunnies, and then call it a girls’ game. Lights… has a solid storyline, amusing NPCs, engaging minigames and pretty cutscenes.
Nancy’s on the set of Pharoah, a remake of a big-budget
Silver Age Egyptian story, where mysterious accidents keep happening,
and she has to figure out who’s behind it. Does a crew member have a
grudge? Is the production cursed? Does it have anything to do with the
tragic death on the set of the original Pharaoh? What’s with that cat?
Playing as Nancy, players have to use items around them to solve
puzzles, a lot like an old Sierra game, only without an inventory.
Every screen has the items for the puzzle on that screen, which keeps
the game very linear, and eliminates wandering from location to
location, wondering what you’ve missed. With the solution to each room
in that room, it’s impossible to get stuck.
A few days ago, Her Interactive posted a preview screenshot of Lights… and a sharp-eyed forum member noticed a sign for a bar in the background, causing a bit of a ruckus
over whether a world in which alcohol exists is an acceptable setting
for an E rated game. I’m even more baffled by the worries about a minor
alcohol reference because Nancy Drew solves murders, embezzlement,
robbery, forgery, etc. Seems like if you’re worried about kids seeing a
sign for a bar, they probably shouldn’t see chalk outlines or death
threats either.
Holy balls! Look at the PC game shelf! Approx 1/3 traditional PC hardcore fare (not shown), 1/3 kids & adventure (e.g. Dora, Nancy Drew, etc – also not shown) and 1/3 $20 casual download titles.
Once the domain of Mumbo Jumbo and a couple others, now every downloadable title to have proven itself beyond a given threshold (not sure what that might be – 100k units? half that maybe?) graduates to physical retail.
I wonder whether this is a nice secondary market or whether it’s “the big leagues”. I’m guessing the former, but who knows!?
The awesome JayIsGames site is running a Best of Casual Gameplay 2009 contest.
PS 
