Since you got a PSP, why you don’t try this?
It’s a great title! (at least the PC version is) .
Well I picked up a few other titles here and there.
I got the Metal Slug collection… although that game has some MAJOR loading issues. There’s that Taito collection too. Got it only for The Legend of Kage - one of my favorite old school titles - although it had a 2.5D remake of it as well (a welcome surprise). Both were used and $10, so I’m happy about it.
Outside of these however, the PSP is kinda boring to me. I don’t use the MP3 or movie thing and whatnot.
DS is far, far superior in terms of title selection. I keep drifting back to Portrait of Ruin, Pokemon Pearl, Megaman ZX, Yohshi Island DS, etc.
When looking at the future line up, DS also has the win: SimCity DS, MySims, Zelda, Harvest Moon 2 DS. 
So far I’ve really liked Brooktown High. It is far from great, but as a first attempt at a dating sim… it’s not half bad. Very shallow to be sure, but fun. I kind of hope they do another one, but cut down the amount of people available for dating, work on the story, and get rid of the whole “opposite sex” only thing. Still… much better than I expected. It kind of reminds me ofGraduation… a lot. It has a good deal of the same structure.
An odd little thing I ran across yesterday at local hobby shop:
http://www.shiftingskies.com/games/index.php/drama
This non-collectible card came, High School Drama! has some “concepts” that strike a cord or two with Brooktown High.
Interestingly, High School Drama! devotes a lot of it’s game mechanics towards character interaction, and seems to do a better job at it than Brooktown.
Card games aren’t my kind of thing: I only play Anima because I don’t have to buy endless expansion sets to stay competitive… but I might grab this one to just see more about it out of curiosity. That and because it’s also like Anima in terms of not needing expansions.
Interesting… pictures of this game from the beta version have been popping up. Since the title is said to have been rushed and suffered massive failures during production, this lets us see where things fell apart. Here are a few of the interesting ones I’ve ran across thus so far:
In-game Starlight
Production CG Meena
Most obvious thing seen: Graphic quality actually dropped between the beta and the commercial release. I’m sure Konami is to blame - seeing as how they would have the authority to push or delay a title for release by the third party dev.
[ 10-14-2007, 07:10 PM: Message edited by: Nargrakhan ]
If you have the game, the manual for it contains pictures of some of the characters drawn by the senior artist of the game (presumably the concept art). If anything, the art in game is much less grotesque.
Anyway, given how poorly most PSP games sell, due to the huge piracy factor, you can’t really blame Konami for kicking it out the door after 2+ years of development. And they did at least spring for a fairly long full color manual and a reversible cover, instead of going cheap.
The more I’ve read about this game, the more I think it just couldn’t be as big as the developers wanted it to be. They actually wanted to do same sex dating, but they didn’t have time to program all the dialogue in. You can also see that they wanted to go farther with the stories, but had to cut back because it would just take to long.
I do hope they do a second game, but they need to make the game a bit… smaller.
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Cut down the amount of characters you can date. 10 Guys and 10 Girls is fun, but it is to daunting for a game like this. Maybe cut it in half. Do five guys and five girls.
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Instead of making all the characters bisexual, just make one or two guys and one or two girls.
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Maybe try do the game in a different style. The art style does grow on you as you play the game, but a big problem is that the graphics aren’t as important as the rest of the game.
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Figure out your market. In America this is a game that would have a very limited male audience. Most male gamers I know wouldn’t be caught dead playing a game like this. In America this would have a large audience with women, b-gamers (obviously) and possibly gay men and women. Hence the importance of same sex dating.
The game suffered because it was just to big. The developers wanted to do so much, but in the end couldn’t do it all. The game suffered for it because the priorites were in the wrong place.
Still, for a first attempt, this isn’t half bad. I enjoyed it a lot actually. It works better on the portable platform because it was a game that I could just pull out and play whenever I felt like it, and there was no real sense of urgency to it. It’s a very casual game (and casual games are getting more popular now.)
A lot of people have mentioned Sprung on here, saying it looks closer to normal B-games… it isn’t. Sprung is a very linear game, and is a very frustrating game. One bad decision and it’s game over. Brooktown was much better.
As for the game being on the PSP… visually it works, but for the demographic who would play this game… it doesn’t. More females seem to have DS’s than PSPs, because the DS is more female friendly. This is not a game that would sell to the average male American. Plain and simple.
Was it two years? I know Backbone staff involved on the project have posted their comments throughout the Internets, but I haven’t been able to locate the majority of them. What many I did find, were on GameFAQ’s forums - but those are long gone now… some I got from friends as attachment emails.
I know Konami’s current production cycle is ordinarily 11 months… so such a long dev time would mean they were unusually kind. IIRC, the legendary Tokimeki Memorial had a dev cycle of two years… such a big difference between the two.
From what I can gather, beta to the game was released for media review in or around May 2006. Final product was released in May 2007.
EDIT
Interesting site I just stumbled on. Has more beta version pics:
http://www.rocketxl.com/brooktown/assets.htm
[ 10-14-2007, 11:49 PM: Message edited by: Nargrakhan ]
If the graphics and dialogue were closer to Japanese TM there might be a somewhat larger male audiance, but still limited because of the people who had PSPs aren’t generally the same as those who have DSs, but otherwise I agree.
Well no worries about them making another mistake: Konami of America is done with the idea of daters in the US. The failure of this game, along with other factors such as financial shifts, is leading them junk these “wastes of resources” and refocus on more mainstream markets that will earn $$$.
There’s also the fact, that key personnel in Japan are now working on making titles that will sell in America: for example Iga is now focusing on Castlevania being geared primarily for US sales, rather than Japanese sales (this had long been done with Metal Gear).
Dead. Dead. Dead.
Atlus is probably a better source for hope, although I’ve spoken with representatives from the company at a convention, and those I spoke with were adamant against daters in general. The explained how the profit to work ration wasn’t worth it… and sadly it all made sense at the time. Things might change, but don’t hold your breath. 
I won’t. At best if Atlus were to make something like that it would be along the lines of Thousand Arms, ie an RPG with a date sim, though you might replace RPG with another genre and Thousand Arms is probably one of their more valuable games outside the Ogre Battle for SNES and PS1 and Tactics Ogre for PS1. Still I don��t expect them to try for a while.