Day-Night cycles

Since it became possible to have an inbuilt clock in games, time has become something of an obsession with developers. They sit around big tables, asking: “Should we have real-time?” or “Should we have a minute represent an hour? Or five minutes? It must all be consistent, or no one will find our game immersive. We can’t have people not being immersed!”

So began the tedious business of having day-night cycles in games, with night time that lasts as long as daytime. Games that work in real time like Animal Crossing and are at least predictable; if it’s night in real life, the game world will be in night mode, where you will have much the same restrictions as you do in real life. You can’t pop to a friend’s at one in the morning, or go shopping at 10pm. I’m fine with this because it does give you a sense of being in a kind of second life; there is a routine, there are rules, there are habits and patterns, you must learn them and follow them if you are to get everything you want to do today done. The same is true for non-real-time life sims such as Harvest Moon.

Phoenix Wright

Phoenix Wright is not a game series it’s easy to find fans for in daily life. I’ve got two brothers, one of whom hates slow paced games with lots of dialogue and the other is so lazy he won’t even take a game suggestion from me because that would involve borrowing a DS and putting some time aside to play it. It truly is a mystery. Anyone would think I was asking him to dig me a military war bunker lined with currency that’s been out of circulation for thirty years.

In any case, Phoenix Wright is one of two franchises I’ve played that was heavy in dialogue. The other was Zone of the Enders on the GBA. Ah, what a nostalgia trip that is. The repetitive witticisms. The character clichés. The endless text-scroll boxes. The incomprehensible storyline. The insultingly easy game play. Phoenix Wright is much newer and better and is more like an interactive story than a traditional video game. There’s no shooting the thing or poking the squirrel or whatever it is you do in popular entertainment nowadays.

Pokemon Black / White

Close, but just falling short of the mark: 4/5

Pokemon. A franchise you either politely and determinedly ignore, like a yelling homeless man on the London Underground, or one which you follow with an insane glint in your eye and a fire in your heart that may well turn you into that yelling homeless man on the London Underground. I fall into the latter category, I fear. An avid Pokemon fan since the age of eight when I stole my brother’s version of Blue and used his Venusaur to destroy a Persian, I am hooked and lost to the world.

The franchise has continued, rightly or wrongly, for fifteen years, spinning off shows and toys and comic books, plus a whole host of other gimmicks, interesting for five minutes and hanging around for just as long. Yes, at one point I really did want a Pokemon themed N64. But we won’t talk about that. After all, Pokemon is a collector’s game; now with 650 little critters to collect, I’d say you’d have to be dangerously obsessed to keep on going.