Monday, November 12, 2007

A Few General Game Tips

My friend Shaggy told me he had purchased Sims2 Castaway so I decided to take a look at the game myself. I borrowed a copy from a friend simply to determine whether or not it would be a suitable future project for me.

My experience with the business of STARTING a new game made me aware of a tip I would like to share with other gamers.

Whenever you play a PSP game, you have a wonderful resource that is not available where DS games are concerned. It usually is available on most platform games such as GameCube or PS2 games as well. You will have the ability to save your game in more than one slot. DO IT BEFORE YOU BEGIN THE ACTUAL GAME!

'Valkyrie Profile Lenneth', 'Harvest Moon Innocent Life' and the 'Sims2 Castaway' games all have long introductions. In the case of Sims2 Castaway, it is not so much an introduction as the rather endless business of creating a crew. As a new player, you have few choices in terms of real customisation. It therefore is rather a tedious business at best. If you save the game in more than one slot afterwards, you can skip that process to begin a new game effortlessly if you do something in your active slot that you later regret!

With a game like 'Valkyrie Profile Lenneth', there are many choices in terms of transferring heroes to Valhalla. By saving your game in multiple slots in different chapters, you can change the outcome, branching off from the original game to make new choices. Innocent Life is more linear than most Harvest Moon games, but you can save your game at different stages if you like. You really are not going to change the outcome, however. There is no marriage option and your character never progresses. In 'Harvest Moon Boy & Girl', however, it is well worth saving your game in different slots BEFORE you choose a spouse. You then will have the benefit of all your hard farming labours and a means by which to experience different marriage scenarios.

'Magical Melody' is a game that was created for the GameCube platform, allowing one to utilise the same strategy of saving in multiple slots BEFORE you marry. This will give you a rich and varied experience of outcomes without forcing you to replay all the chores of creating and expanding your farm.

As I write this, I still am working on 'MySims' for the Wii platform. I have discovered a number of time-saving tips for this game, but will add them to the guide as they are specific to the game. I will say, however, that it is very useful to be able to copy a piece of furniture BEFORE you place any Essences on it and then stash the copy in your house or some one else's house for future use in other Tasks. For example, more than one Sim will request a chair or a sink. When you create a chair, make an extra copy WITHOUT Essences and stash it somewhere so that you can copy it again and again. You can alter the copy and customise it if you wish to create unique designs each time, but you will not be forced to build the basic chair more than once if you utilise this strategy. Building is fun, but building a mirror again and again could become rather tedious!