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Spoiled

I bought Secret Files: Tunguska earlier this month to play on my DS. Another game finished in just over 17 hours. Must be some kind of gaming formula. So over all took me between two and three weeks to finish it. Not a bad amount of time really even if it does seem like a short amount of time.

I really did enjoy the game a lot. I was a little sad when I reached the end. There is a Secret Files 2 coming out though so there’s something to look forward to. I wish I was still playing Tunguska though sometimes. The story wasn’t pure brilliance, but it was very interesting and well written. Visually it was lovely even on the small screen of my DS. No, the thing that has me wishing for Tunguska is the pure genius of the gameplay.

There are two things that were utter brilliance in the gameplay for the DS. The first is a little magnifying glass in the top right corner of the screen. Clicking this little icon would highlight all objects you could interact with. The second thing was that if I clicked on one of those highlighted objects it would immediately show me if I could interact with it or just identify it by showing an eyeball icon or a hand and an eyeball.

On the face of it these two things don’t seem like brilliance but they are. This week I was playing an adventure puzzle game and it was while I was playing this game that I realised Tunguska had spoiled me rotten. In just a couple weeks I had gotten used to not being frustrated by a puzzle game.  To know what I can interact with and how did so much to the enjoyment of Tunguska that it took playing a game without those features to realised it.

Very often it’s the small things in games that impress me. In Zelda is was the interaction with the maps and with Crystal Chronicles it was the battle system. These are the kind of things that increasingly see me adoring games on the DS. Sometimes it’s just the little things that make a game stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s the little things that spoil me when I play other games.

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Comments

5 responses to “Spoiled”

  1. Michael avatar
    Michael

    I think that hand icon is a staple of the Broken Sword and Myst games; I’m not certain of that though.

    Do you lot know of any quality games in this genre on the PS2?

  2. Donna avatar
    Donna

    The hand icon is a staple of most puzzle games. The revolutionary thing in Tunguska is being able to click a single icon and it shows you all the things you can click on and then when you click those it shows you what you can do with it. Thus stopping the need to move your pointer over every single pixel of the screen to find what you can click on.

    Off the top of my head I can’t really think of any PS2 games of this type. I would think it’d be rather tedious to do this kind of game on any console other than the Wii, which Tunguska was released on also.

  3. Dave avatar
    Dave

    I dont know if you heard already (though you probably have), but the absolutely awesome Sam & Max: Season One and Two is heading to Wii in the near future, if you like point n’ clicks, this is one of the best 🙂

  4. Michael avatar
    Michael

    Ah right, Donna. What I meant was that particular items in those games were shown to be interactive by moving the cursor over them, without clicking on them, as it changed appearance accordingly. The puzzle was working out the context to use (or combine) those items in. I think so anyhow, been a long time since I played them.

    There must be SOME examples of this genre on systems not made by Nintendo, surely? Come on, dazzle me with your gaming knowledge people!

  5. Donna avatar
    Donna

    Yes,Michael you’re right. But to find those items you have to move your mouse over every single pixel of the screen. Tunguska has eliminated this annoyance.

    I really can’t think of any games of this genre on the Sony or MS systems. RPGs are usually the standard instead. You really need an easy way to move a cursor around on the screen and the other systems don’t provide this without annoying the player. This is why the Wii and DS are really good for this genre.

    Dave I had heard and I’m really excited. I love Sam & Max.

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