Brooktown High: Senior Year Hands-On

Konami will test the waters of the Western gaming market later this year with the PSP's Brooktown High: Senior Year, which is perhaps the first dating simulation ever to reach a mass audience in North America. The dating genre has been huge in Japan for years, with such titles as Konami's own Tokimeki Memorial leading the pack, but those games have generally been too esoteric and anime-influenced for English localization. Brooktown is being crafted by the developers at Backbone Entertainment as a more accessible and Western-themed game, and we had a chance to check it out at Konami's recent event.

Naturally, you'll start off by creating your dude or dudette with the requisite choices of hairstyle, skin color, height, weight, demeanor, and so on. These choices will set a number of transparent statistics that determine your aptitude in various school subjects. You'll then go about your daily business at school, choosing which classes you want to take to further improve your skills in such as areas as physics and physical education. These skills form the basis of your ability to attract the opposite sex and specifically determine what sort of characters you'll be able to attract. If only real high school dating were this scientific.

Your bedroom is essentially the game's hub, where you'll return after class each day to hang out and study on the weekends (apparently you've got no social life outside of your drive to get some action). In your bedroom, you can shop for clothes, adding new shirts, pants, jackets, shoes, and accessories to your ensemble. You can also log on to your computer to join various clubs (which will further increase your stats in various areas) or apply to colleges.

The game will feature a number of minigames that you'll play at various times throughout your dating adventures, and we got to sample a couple of them via a practice menu in the bedroom. There's a dancing-rhythm game similar to Dance Dance Revolution (though it only uses the D pad directions, from what we saw), and this game will make use of a number of licensed tracks from such bands as Simple Minds. We also tried out tongue wrestling, which had us moving a little pair-of-lips icon around the screen to avoid falling obstacles while two tongues interlocked at the bottom of the screen. In addition to all the dodging, we had to spritz an oncoming cloud of halitosis occasionally. Yuck.

Once you're in school, you'll find a bunch of kids fitting into various cliques (jocks, preps, hippies, nerds, and so on) wandering the grounds that you can talk to via a branching conversation system. Naturally, your choices will influence your reputation around school. The ultimate goal of the game is to become the prom king or queen, so it will probably behoove you to make nice with as many people as you can. Just don't go breaking a lot of hearts.

It's hard to say whether the American gaming community is ready for the dating simulator, but we did find Brooktown High to be quite accessible and easy to get into after a couple of minutes. The game is slated to hit the PSP this fall, so keep an eye out for more in the coming months.