What do you get if you cross my favourite genre with the Nintendo DS?
You get a Point & Touch Adventure of course. No need to click any more, just tap the screen with the stylus.
That is the premise behind Another Code: Two Memories, which came out here in Europe yesterday (America has to wait a few months, and it'll be called Trace Memory). The bottom screen has a top-down view of the area, and you move the heroine, Ashley Mizuki Robins, around using either the D-Pad or stylus. The top screen has a gorgeous Myst-style pre-rendered image of what she's looking at.
If you tap the Examine icon on the bottom screen, the 1st person view is duplicated on the touch screen. Tap to move the cursor over whatever you want to interact with, then tap an icon along the side of the screen to examine/talk to/use an item on it.
The plot involves Ashley searching for her father- she thought he had been killed when she was three, but this morning- the day before her fourteenth birthday- she received a strange mini-computer called a DAS (which looks very similar to a DS unit). On it was a message from her father asking her to come to Blood Edward Island to meet him. With her aunt Jessica, who has raised her since she was young, Ashley travels out to the island, but her father is nowhere to be seen. She does, however, bump into a ghost called 'D' who has lost his memories.
I love this game, and hope that we see more like it. They've taken what I have always believed to be the only totally perfect control scheme and made it even better- now if only Lucasarse would start making a new Monkey Island or Grim Fandango for DS...
Anyway- if you have a DS, buy Another Code. If you haven't... get a DS and buy Another Code.
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