Which, er, won’t come until the time limit’s up. And then, even if you are brutally honest (as indeed am I), you’ll finish the task well ahead of the time limit, and expect your congratulation. So unless you’re brutally honest, there’s no reason to fail. Except, well, the game can be played on pause. The task would be to create six enclosures of varying types, emulating the correct conditions for the particular animals, presumably before time runs out. Say you’ve been given six months to create six enclosures for some rescued animals, shipped over from closing zoos around the world. However, these scenarios are peculiarly flawed. A small amount of imagination has gone into these, following the usual variations on the theme - limited funding, limited animals, etc, more difficult challenges unlocked as you progress. Then secondly there are fifteen scenarios, pre-set challenges to be apparently completed within a certain time limit. Via funding research, new attractions become available, and a more elaborate zoo a possibility. This could be anything from a nice grassy field, to a lake surrounded by jungle, to a volcanic hill. Firstly, a free sandbox mode, in which you begin with the most basic zoo-building elements, and build your park on any of a large selection of land types. In fairness, the majority of this game is spent struggling to lay out fences. Confused? Imagine playing it.Īnd now imagine that the tile cursor is all but the exact same green as the grass, such that it’s mostly impossible to find it.Īnd gets more complicated. And indeed ‘right’ going both right-and-up and right-and-down. Surely no one, ever, would have it be that ‘up’ goes bothdiagonally up-and-right and up-and-left, alternately. ‘up’ goes diagonally up-and-left, ‘right’ goes diagonally right-and-down, and so on. Let’s say there was no touch-screen, and this was your only option - all common sense says: ask the player to assume the D-pad operates at a 45 degree angle. The D-pad, responsible for orchestrating the majority of the control, contrarily would form a +. So if you were to plot North, South, East and West, you’d have an X. The game is displayed from an isometric perspective, all on the diagonal. That’s the only less intuitive control method I can think of than that chosen for Zoo Tycoon DS. Did you play Beyond Good & Evil to the end? That bit where the boss reverses your controls, so to roll to the left, you have to go right, instead of forward, backward? It was painfully confusing. It’s kind of hard to describe this in words, so bear with me. So what possessed anyone to not only fail to take advantage of this, but seemingly go out of their way to make the game as impossible to control as they could? Given the wonder of the DS touch screen - the cleverest idea in non-PC gaming in over four hundred years - finally such games can be portable, unleashed from your desk. It’s why management games are such an awful faff on a console. When played in their natural environment of a PC, obviously the mouse is used to ‘paint’ the scenery onto the screen. A management game, creating and running your own zoo, could be beautifully controlled with the gratifying immediacy of the stylus. Zoo Tycoon DS puts the zoo display on the top screen, and various forms of interface on the bottom - immediately crazy. Got no style 'Concrete chain fences' must be using some sort of futuristic polymer we’ve yet to have heard of. In the interests of science, let’s drop a DS playing Zoo Tycoon from a third storey window, and see what happens. If a chimpanzee falls from a third storey window onto concrete, it will pick itself up, dust itself off, and bound away. They didn’t think of that aforementioned idea. It’s something of a shame that Zoo Tycoon developers Blue Fang respond to this by having been seven times more dense than a chimpanzee. So, I learned today that chimpanzees have a bone density seven times greater than a human. But please, you’re embarrassing me - I’m a modest man. I know, you don’t stumble upon genius like this every day. Pick yourself back up off the floor, dust yourself down, and close your mouth. If you’re going to make a management game on the DS, you could replace the traditional mouse interface with the stylus! Take your phone off the hook, turn down your music, you’re going to want to concentrate. And now, for your viewing entertainment, I’m going to come up with an exceptionally good idea.
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