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Posts with tag touchdetective

A touching talk with Touch Detective's Jamie Ortiz

Joystiq's Ludwig Kietzmann sat down recently with Touch Detective's project lead, Jamie Ortiz, for a little hands-on. Or more likely just discussion, since we're pretty sure there's a court order floating around that keeps Ludwig at least twenty feet from everyone in the industry.

Among other topics, they discussed the challenges involved in translating a story-heavy game from Japanese into English and the changes that had to be made -- and how they tackled those challenges while remaining true to the original characters. They spent a little time exploring the art style as well, and Ortiz mentioned that the style is often compared to Tim Burton's work, but we prefer the comparison one of our readers here at DS Fanboy drew -- the style looks influenced by the work of Jhonen Vasquez, the brilliant and twisted mind behind Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee!, and Invader Zim.

And it seems we're not the only ones who think Funghi is somewhat questionable in shape, though the esteemed Mr. Ortiz did not seem to share our opinion. We'll leave it up to you to decide.

Touch Detective's sinister boxart



Touch Detective
leaves us a little speechless around the DS Fanboy offices. The game looks great, but there's just something about the art style that seems ... well ... sinister. Creepy, even. Sure, the game will be a blast. It's the new Phoenix Wright -- offbeat and interesting story and touchscreen-centric gameplay. But just look at the characters! We can handle the robot butler, though with that beaky nose, he resembles some sort of evil muppet refugee from the '80s. But Mackenzie, the heroine, looks perpetually terrified and it makes us wonder if she's just traumatized by the death of her father or if maybe that little phallic mushroom guy is exploiting her offscreen.

Or maybe we just have too much time on our hands. Touch Detective will be available for a little hands-on next month.

DS impressions: Touch Detective

"This game seems a little confusing."
"Yes, it's almost as if it's in a completely different language."

As the E3 demo had not yet been translated from Japanese, it was initially difficult to come to grips with Atlus' Touch Detective. Luckily, a background in old-school adventure gaming served as a boost over the language barrier. The game is, at its heart, a completely traditional adventure (point-and-clicker, if you prefer) augmented by a very bizarre art style. Using the touch screen and stylus to move your wide-eyed character, collect objects, traverse dialogue trees and examine the environment, the gameplay is just about a perfect portable representation of a genre considered to be dead by many. Many people are wrong.

Though I couldn't make heads or tails (or any sort of appendage) of the story, the game is littered with strange characters, including a talking corpse and a sentient mushroom...phallus...thing. We'll have a better idea of where the game is headed once it enters localization, but for now, it appears to be a visually arresting throwback to the adventure games of yore.

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