Ping.
I'm driving my 12-year-old Ford Escort on the freeway at 7 a.m., on my way to my day job. There's not as much traffic as there would be around 7:45, of course, but it's still not exactly wide-open road. I'm probably going about 75 mph. Oh, and I'm playing a game on my old DS Lite.
Ping.
I see in my rear-view mirror a billboard that says "Buckle Up, Hang Up, Heads Up"—part of a campaign to get drivers to pay undivided attention to the road. I chuckle a little.
Ping-ping-ping.
I'm impressed; that was a pretty big score right there. I look around me a minute and peek down at the seat to check my progress. I am playing a game, but I'm not really endangering the other drivers around me. The game in question is a preview build of Aspyr's Treasure World, and as my auto insurance company will no doubt appreciate, I'm playing it totally hands-off.
I'm concentrating on the road, thinking about my route. I mentally note that this is the first time I've driven this route with Treasure World sitting neatly on my passenger seat, so I can expect to do pretty well. For the trip home, I'm picking up my son from my aunt's; I can expect to get a good score there since it's another brand-new route. And I'm thinking about alternative routes I might try for future trips later in the week.
Ping.
You see, how I get from point A to point B is very important to Treasure World. The game, which I have running on that open DS Lite with the brightness cranked all the way up—oh, and it had to be the Lite; Nintendo's development carts don't work on my beloved DSi—is scanning the air for Wi-Fi signals. If it sees one it hasn't seen before, I'll be sweeping up some new treasure for the game. Driving through the heart of downtown is a great way to get treasure, but I can only go this way once. Future trips along the same path might pick up one or two additional stray signals, but I'm never going to score this big again unless I look at some different roads.
Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping...
Clear line-of-sight of an office park. This should be good. I grin gleefully.
This is how Treasure World encourages players to, as the game puts it when you engage the treasure-seeking mode, "explore [their] world." It may not sound like much on its face, getting random treasures just for walking or driving past Wi-Fi signals, but the plotting and planning to maximize how much I can find on any given trip is a game in and of itself. And sure enough, I've not only driven several routes that I was familiar with but eschewed in the interests of efficiency, but I've also taken new paths on walks around the neighborhood. I've been exploring, and I'm being scored for it.
I arrive at work and tap the icon to stop the treasure-seeking. I've managed to find nearly two hundred "stars" on this trip alone; many of them are treasure, and some "stardust," the game's currency with which you can buy more treasure that you haven't found outright yet. A couple are duplicates; I get equivalent stardust for those. One's a decidedly Chun-Li-looking hairdo that I can outfit the Wish Finder—the little robot dude who is responsible for seeking the treasure—with, so after the treasure scroll is done, I hop on over to his buddy the Star Sweep, who's marooned on Earth at present and needs my stardust to get off the planet and get back to work, and buy some hopefully-matching items. Some customization, ditching the previous "angry Santa doing sumo poses" look and voilà —my treasure is now being swept up by a meekish-looking geisha.
The treasures you can pick up are all toys like this. Many outfit the Wish Finder in some amusing fashion; others give him (?) new moves. Still others are landscaping items that you can lay out in the glade where the Wish Finder and Star Sweep are hanging out at present. You can arrange them to display them, and you can use the intrinsic sounds that each item has to sequence up some music. It's all play, and it's fun, but the real game is what you do when you're not poking at the DS screen.
When I finally and reluctantly sent the Treasure World preview build back, I noticed that even with the dozen or so trips I took it on and the countless treasures I'd bought explicitly with stardust, I only had maybe about 20% of all the treasure that it seemed the game had. I had a lot of exploring left to do, especially when I considered that I'd be seeing more and more duplicate treasures the larger my collection became. On top of that, the game did encourage me to join something called "Club Treasure World" (which isn't up yet, so I couldn't). It's the game's website that will link up with your game and, as Aspyr's site says, let me "chat with members to find out their favorite treasure spots, show off music and treasures, set up trades and more!"—leading me to suspect that even more of the bigger "game" of exploring and collecting will be played without buring your face in the DS.
I've seen and loved many neat new concepts on the Nintendo DS since it debuted in 2004, but Treasure World is in a class of its own. It's the notion of playing without "playing" as we've always known it—even when we added screens and styli—that's what Treasure World is built on, and I'm looking forward to tasting it again when the final game releases.
In addition to my week of joyriding, I also had the opportunity to ask some questions of Justin "CosMind" Leingang, creative director at Aspyr Media and lead designer on Treasure World, learning about how the game came to be and more about how it works.
Come back tomorrow for the full interview.
I'm driving my 12-year-old Ford Escort on the freeway at 7 a.m., on my way to my day job. There's not as much traffic as there would be around 7:45, of course, but it's still not exactly wide-open road. I'm probably going about 75 mph. Oh, and I'm playing a game on my old DS Lite.
Ping.
I see in my rear-view mirror a billboard that says "Buckle Up, Hang Up, Heads Up"—part of a campaign to get drivers to pay undivided attention to the road. I chuckle a little.
Ping-ping-ping.
I'm impressed; that was a pretty big score right there. I look around me a minute and peek down at the seat to check my progress. I am playing a game, but I'm not really endangering the other drivers around me. The game in question is a preview build of Aspyr's Treasure World, and as my auto insurance company will no doubt appreciate, I'm playing it totally hands-off.
Ping.
You see, how I get from point A to point B is very important to Treasure World. The game, which I have running on that open DS Lite with the brightness cranked all the way up—oh, and it had to be the Lite; Nintendo's development carts don't work on my beloved DSi—is scanning the air for Wi-Fi signals. If it sees one it hasn't seen before, I'll be sweeping up some new treasure for the game. Driving through the heart of downtown is a great way to get treasure, but I can only go this way once. Future trips along the same path might pick up one or two additional stray signals, but I'm never going to score this big again unless I look at some different roads.
Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping...
Clear line-of-sight of an office park. This should be good. I grin gleefully.
This is how Treasure World encourages players to, as the game puts it when you engage the treasure-seeking mode, "explore [their] world." It may not sound like much on its face, getting random treasures just for walking or driving past Wi-Fi signals, but the plotting and planning to maximize how much I can find on any given trip is a game in and of itself. And sure enough, I've not only driven several routes that I was familiar with but eschewed in the interests of efficiency, but I've also taken new paths on walks around the neighborhood. I've been exploring, and I'm being scored for it.
The treasures you can pick up are all toys like this. Many outfit the Wish Finder in some amusing fashion; others give him (?) new moves. Still others are landscaping items that you can lay out in the glade where the Wish Finder and Star Sweep are hanging out at present. You can arrange them to display them, and you can use the intrinsic sounds that each item has to sequence up some music. It's all play, and it's fun, but the real game is what you do when you're not poking at the DS screen.
When I finally and reluctantly sent the Treasure World preview build back, I noticed that even with the dozen or so trips I took it on and the countless treasures I'd bought explicitly with stardust, I only had maybe about 20% of all the treasure that it seemed the game had. I had a lot of exploring left to do, especially when I considered that I'd be seeing more and more duplicate treasures the larger my collection became. On top of that, the game did encourage me to join something called "Club Treasure World" (which isn't up yet, so I couldn't). It's the game's website that will link up with your game and, as Aspyr's site says, let me "chat with members to find out their favorite treasure spots, show off music and treasures, set up trades and more!"—leading me to suspect that even more of the bigger "game" of exploring and collecting will be played without buring your face in the DS.
I've seen and loved many neat new concepts on the Nintendo DS since it debuted in 2004, but Treasure World is in a class of its own. It's the notion of playing without "playing" as we've always known it—even when we added screens and styli—that's what Treasure World is built on, and I'm looking forward to tasting it again when the final game releases.
In addition to my week of joyriding, I also had the opportunity to ask some questions of Justin "CosMind" Leingang, creative director at Aspyr Media and lead designer on Treasure World, learning about how the game came to be and more about how it works.
Come back tomorrow for the full interview.