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Lost In Blue Preview
Written by Señor Cha Cha on Thursday, June 23, 2005
This game could help you get onto Survivor. Or not. Full preview inside.
I wouldn't mind having an entire island all to myself but not because of a tragedy at sea. However, such is the case with the hero in Konami's upcoming Nintendo DS title, Lost in Blue, a survival RPG that forces you and a fellow companion to "rough it" by rubbing the system's touch screen.
After a trip gone awry washes our hero ashore, he awakes on a beautiful island, but unlike the film Castaway he's not alone. After bumping into a 17-year old girl who appears to be from the same accident, the two set off into the depths of the forest in an attempt to not only keep themselves alive but to locate help. Much like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, decisions that both characters make can greatly affect the outcome of the story.
To survive you're going to need to do a host of different things, and much of what Konami's shown is the typical stuff one should do if stuck in the middle of nowhere. You'll fuse sticks and sharp rocks to make spears, craft bows and arrows, fish and hunt wild game, make fire by rubbing two sticks together, and dig in the sand to find assorted objects such as clams for food. There's also some light puzzle solving such as rolling a log so you can use it to reach previously unreachable areas.
At this point I can only speculate how the DS's touch screen will be used, though it doesn't take a Dr. Wily to figure out how you'll do this. Fishing is done from a first person perspective, so you might yank the rod back by swiping the screen with the stylus. The same goes for creating fire. Doing it the old fashioned Boy Scout way, you'll probably rub the screen back and forth until you see sparks fly.
While the DS is more than capable of some impressive graphics I haven't been impressed with any of its games, save for Lost in Blue. Konami's adventure title is really pretty, featuring simplistic yet stylish 3D character models and some sweet lighting effects, in particular sunlight streaking through the lush, green trees.
Above all else, I hope Lost in Blue is a meaty adventure game, because nothing would be worse than landing on this island and finding a means of escape sixty minutes later. However, I do know that when you beat the game you're able to play through it again using the girl as the main character, and supposedly her experience is a lot different, so unless Konami's hyping this up we should be getting two games for the price of one.
Lost in Blue is what the DS needs, a non-Nintendo title that not only showcases the system's abilities but provides us with a unique gameplay experience that really hasn't been explored before. It's just a bummer that it's not coming out until August, and that release date isn't even final! However, Konami needs this time to make the game as good as possible, and I'm crossing my fingers that it'll be one of the few times where being lost is a great thing.
