August 29, 2007
It's whom
UBI Soft's Sprung for the Nintendo DS ("A Game Where Everyone Scores") is
... a dating simulation designed to challenge your thinking skills. What do you say to that cute stranger you've just met? Do you know what to say to make them laugh and smile? Will you mess up and make them angry at you?
The reviews on amazon suggest why this game has not been a hit:
I did enjoy this game enough to solve it with both a male and a female. It is quite fun to try to use items on different people to see what will happen, like spraying them with mace.
The concept seems kind of cool at first: you want to fall in love with the main character of the opposite sex. The problem is, everything in this game is completely impossible to predict. If you pick the seemingly best responses, you don't necessarily win.
I havent completed the game, But i intend to if i can get over the part where becky has to get conor to ask her out. If you know how to pass that part, PLEASE post the awnsers on here for the game. i cant even get past the part where brett is on a scavenger hunt, and has to get 2 things, 1. Womens underwear and 2. a pic of a dragon tattoo plz help me thanx
Apparently, as an alternative to spraying cute strangers with mace, you can get prescriptive with them:
(As James Thurber explained many years ago, "it is better to use 'whom' when in doubt, and even better to re-word the statement, and leave out all the relative pronouns, except ad, ante, con, in , inter, ob, post, prae, pro, sub, and super.")
It seems to me that Nintendo and Ubi Soft have missed an opportunity here. They should have hired some really interesting writers to create interactive modules for this game. You could select Alice Munro's version, or Dave Barry's -- or let the DS shift randomly among them.
If you want to explore Sprung further, this thread at Something Awful looks promising.
[hat tip to Caitlin Light]
Posted by Mark Liberman at August 29, 2007 06:49 AM