E3 06: Brooktown High: Senior Year Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--It's not often that we get a chance to spend time wooing the ladies at E3, and it's even less common for us to do so without knowing within the first few minutes that we're wasting our time. Our luck was with us earlier today, then, when we realized that Konami had a playable demo of Brooktown High: Senior Year at its booth with no fewer than four different females for us to have a crack at scoring a weekend date with.

Announced earlier this week, Brooktown High: Senior Year is a dating sim in which you'll assume the role of a senior year exchange student moving to a new high school and attempting to secure a date for the prom that's just 32 short weeks away. The demo version of the game that we played tasked us with securing a weekend date with one of four girls in the school, which were described to us as a preppy, a goth, a jock, and a nerd. In the finished game, you'll be able to play as either a boy or a girl, and your answers to a brief personality quiz at the start of the game will determine your character's parents, wardrobe, personality, athletic ability, smarts, originality, and charm.

Much of your time in Brooktown High: Senior Year will be spent conversing with other students or playing unusual minigames. You'll cruise the school corridors in an attempt to make friends through the art of conversation, improve your attributes by attending classes and clubs, and, if everything goes according to plan, spend your weekends taking girls on dates to such exotic locales as the local diner, a French restaurant, the beach, the mall, a garage, and--wait for it--a LAN party. There will be a narrative spanning the entire 32-week school year, and how much of it you get to experience will depend largely upon your relationships with the other characters. Choosing the nicest-sounding responses to questions from the kids that you meet isn't terribly difficult, of course, but things will definitely get tricky when the only way to become friends with one character is to stab another in the back. You'll generally get three different response options to choose from for every conversational prompt, including such surefire winners as "chitchat college," "play hard to get," "don't take her crap," "cut her down," and "ignore her."

You'll have plenty of more pleasant options to choose from as well, of course, and if you play your cards right you might find yourself on a weekend date that moves from the beach to a secret cave location, for example. Of that we'll say no more. Since relationships in high school are rarely perfect, it will be impossible for you to simply secure a date on your first weekend in the game and then maintain a healthy relationship until the prom at the end of the year. Rather, you'll find that events beyond your control, such as vacations and rivals for your partner's affections, get in the way, and you're forced to play the field.

We were told that the version of Brooktown High: Senior Year that we played today was only around 15 percent complete, but the game already shows plenty of promise in what will be a new genre for many territories outside of Japan. We look forward to bringing you more information on Brooktown High: Senior Year (and its rumored tongue-wrestling minigames) ahead of its spring semester 2007 North American release.