Here are more news bits I picked up. A rhythm action game called "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan" is coming out in Japan at the end of July. It features a (reportedly) all-star J-pop lineup. It includes "Ready Steady Go!" by L'Arc~en~Ciel, which was in Dai Gassou! Band Brothers, but the rest sound pretty unfamiliar. Unfortunately there's pretty much nothing on the web in English about it whatsoever.
Animal Crossing is coming to the Revolution as well as the DS, probably with some cool wifi-powered link-up feature. Revolution downloads will not be free (not that Nintendo ever said they were). If you look at Nintendo's Japanese site, such as if you're trying to find information on Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, you'd see several games that might be the pretty popular DS: Brain Training for Adults. NEC has a page about the ceramic piezoelectric gyroscope used for tilt detection in WarioWare Twisted. Several 8-bit bleep musicians have preannounced a Kraftwerk cover compilation called "We're the Operators." There's a vaguely bleep-ish covers album of 80s songs that's not so great just because the 80s songs are so bleepy themselves, so hopefully We're the Operators will be more along the lines of the 8-bit Christmas collection.
Lost Garden has a game design review of Nintendogs that touches on what it means to be a game (that is, calls out all the people who say it's more a sim, not a game). Along the same lines as the argument that Nintendogs is a great game in Japan for offering the pet experience without the hassle, it would be cool to have a lawn management game... but many of those small tasks get rolled up into something like Animal Crossing, I guess.
The other way of looking at it is to look for the key elements that make up any game.
- Are there psychological risk / reward systems?
- Are there overlapping reward cycles on different timescales?
- Can the game design be classified into standard game design elements such as tokens, verbs and rules?
- Can the various layers of the game design be separated out so that the title can be examined in terms of core mechanics, metamechanics, contextualized tokens, plot, etc?
Nintendogs has clear game mechanism in each of these areas. There are clearly specific elements throughout the game that match existing game system that have been used throughout the history of game design. The theoretical designer realizes that a powerup is a powerup whether you call it a 'Quad Damage' or a 'Doggy Brush'.
Meanwhile, inspired by realistic scenery in racing games and a love of travel, Jane at Game Girl Advance wants tourism games. With the new generation of portable apps, you could have real interactive travel guides as well, much less the enjoyment of exploring places.
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