The Clique: Diss and Make Up (review)

by me. Another MyGamer review. And, yes, I really was hoping this could be a game equivalent of Mean Girls. Even though, deep in my heart, I really knew how difficult that would be for a game to pull off.

When I first saw The Clique almost everything about it—from the title to the packaging—rang not so distant bells of Mean Girls, a movie I came to love in my freshman year of college. Mean Girls, although it had a fairly standard, cliché plot of a high school drama movie, had a ridiculously funny take on the unnecessary, terribly catty way girls can treat each other. When I picked up mean girls, I was hoping I would find the same sarcastic take on high school with the witty humor, and well-loved and well–hated stereotypes. The Clique fell short of my Mean Girls hopes, and despite some flaws, the game stands as a so-so high school simulator.

The game begins with your character moving to a new school. From there, you traverse the various cliques (the artists, the nerds, the jocks, etc.) and climb the social ladder, trying to make friends and find your place in the school. The goal of each chapter in the game is to get invited to a certain clique’s party, eventually working your way up to the Pretty Committee, which is made up of four of the most revered and feared girls in school. You befriend cliques by conforming to each clique’s dress code, and running errands for them, eventually earning your party invitation. The story is dialogue-driven with many, many text boxes, most of which are comments from other students berating your fashion sense and the Pretty Committee making sure you stay at the bottom of the social totem pole.

The gameplay is a formulaic and simple point-and-click with a few touch screen-based mini-games at school and at the mall thrown into the mix. The school minigames are loosely based on the academic class you have scheduled for that day (i.e. art is drawing certain shapes, chemistry is tapping and shaking bottles in the correct order, gym is rock-climbing with hazards like falling bowling balls and paper planes. No kidding.). These come in three levels of difficulty and are somewhat repetitive. Minigames at the mall take the role of your part-time job, and your performance at the clothes, ice cream, taco, or coffee shop determine how much money you earn. The clothes department is easily the most lucrative, even if the game occasionally didn’t recognize my stylus’s input.

The day begins with your character getting dressed for school, and wearing different clothes and outfits boosts your compatibility with certain cliques. When you character is shopping or picking out what to wear that day, horizontal meters will show how compatible your outfit is with all the cliques. If you haven’t maxed out the meter, other characters won’t even talk to you. They’ll snub you with a snide comment and wait until you go buy more clothes. After that, you’ll run a few simple errands for them in between classes and at lunch, and they finally stop treating you like dirt and hand you a party invite. The cut scenes at parties drive along the story’s high school romance drama and dating politics.

While much of the dialogue, characters and writing in The Clique was believable, something would ring false with reality and punctuate the story, like the students used bluetooths when calling each other on the phone, or the outer space-obsessed kid who mentions a LARP club. Instructions for gameplay are made up of snappy soundbytes and tended to abuse the word “ah-mazing.” As is a problem with most text-based games, a lot of the NPC dialogue gets repetitive after the game’s halfway point.

The game’s music is for the most part poppy and upbeat, and the number of original vocal tracks is surprising. The graphics are clean and eye-pleasing, and navigation is exceptionally easy. I loved that I could teleport my character to any classroom in the school just by clicking the room I wanted to go to on the map. Moving your character around the room is simple, too, although it’s the first game I’ve had to triple-click on a NPC to talk with them immediately (one click will move your character slowly over towards them, and a double-click will have your character walk slightly faster). One major, major snag I ran into at the end though was when I triple-clicked on a movement arrow and the whole game locked up. Luckily, I’m a rabid game saver, so I wasn’t set back at all, and the error wasn’t repeated.

The Clique has a few bugs, but it plays just like a usual chick flick or high school romance movie—just not on the same echelon as my beloved Mean Girls. With the game’s shopping, dating and pure power-pinkness, The Clique has much potential to be a fun game for younger girls. Just beware of a possibly short replay value and play time.

Pic Pic review

by me. A MyGamer review. An awesome game that should be imported to America.



Puzzles! Pictures! If it were available in America, you would buy it!

Success’s Pic Pic is the most fun I’ve had with a puzzle game in a long, long time. All puzzlers I’ve played in recent memory have had their gimmicks or missions to inject fun into puzzle-solving. Professor Layton wraps mystery stories around riddles. Brain Age’s Dr. Kawashima taunts your aging brain at every failure. Classics like Columns, Tetris, PuyoPuyo all focus on battling spatial limitations, time or another player. And this is exactly why Pic Pic took me aback at first. There’s no story, no versus mode, no outside elements to inject more “fun” into the gameplay; just paint-by-the-numbers puzzles that form pixilated pictures on completion and an inconspicuous clock that times your progress. While PicPic doesn’t pack the sassy punch or dramatic overtones of many recent games, it still provides a challenging, fun, if not relaxing experience.

Pic Pic has three modes of play, which end with the puzzle forming a pixelized picture. Players input their answers on the touch screen, and can watch this picture form on the top-screen, which contains a scaled-down version of the whole puzzle. Maze Paint mode presents players with a maze and, in traditional maze-solving style, has the player trace a line on the touch screen from the entrance to the exit, filling in the lines to a picture.

Drawing and Magipic modes, however, present more interesting challenges that have a much steeper learning curve. Drawing mode lays out pairs of matching numbers ranging from 1-20 on a grid. The player must connect matching numbers (i.e., a four to another four, and a five to another five), but the length a player can extend the connecting line from the number is determined by the number itself (i.e., if you have a four, you can only connect to other fours that are four spaces away). These connecting lines are drawn horizontally and vertically, and can do a lot of zigzagging once the player reaches the higher-number puzzles.

MagiPic mode easily has the highest learning curve and is the most frustrating. In an odd sudoku/Picross/paint-by-numbers mix, MagiPic challenges players to fill in the correct amount and placement of pixels in a 3x3, nine-block square to form a black-and-white picture. The number in the center of this square, which ranges from 0-9, represents the number of pixels that will be filled in this square. Having a square with 0 or 9 is easy enough to fill in, but when the nine-block squares begin to over-lap, the puzzle easily becomes chaotic. A wrong guess can throw the whole puzzle off and be very difficult to solve. The monochromatic picture is also more difficult to guess than the one’s in Maze Paint and Drawing, where the player can make an educated guess on where to go next if they’re stuck on a half-formed picture.

The sheer number of puzzles (1,200, total) in Pic Pic is astounding, as is the amount of digital screen space the most difficult puzzles span. I spent an hour or so solving Drawing puzzle #395, which is several screens wide and tall on the most zoomed out view, and had only completed 75% of it. PicPic provides seemingly endless hours of puzzles, and, surprisingly, the concept never gets old. Once I actually got the hang of completing the puzzles, the game was very easy to pick up, and play for about 15 minutes on a regular basis. While Pic Pic allows the player to save and solve one puzzle at a time and each mode, I wish each mode could’ve had a couple of save files because I would get tired of working on the same puzzle for a while.

The design and controls of the game are flawless, and incredibly easy to understand. Everything is controlled by a simple click or press on the touch screen with the stylus, and the D-pad can be used to glide over the puzzle and fill in the easy-to-solve spots in Drawing and MagiPic, and also allow you to keep your stylus free as you navigate which passageway to take next in Maze Paint. The sounds and music are all repetitive and simple, but blend well with the game and are easy on the ears (except for the jarring buzzing sound from when you hit the border of a puzzle). Prepare to switch on some different background music while solving puzzles, because the one track of music the game provides gets boring after while.

The final pictures are strangely rewarding, and a nice complement to the “oh-thank-god-I-finally-finished it” feeling that comes with filling in the last pixel. I ended up drawing a ninja, a horse, a man and a woman at a festival, a frog, elephants swimming through the water, and many other things more simple and complicated. While the no-frills fun of Pic Pic has seen releases in Japan, Europe and Australia, it has yet to hit North American shelves, which is unfortunate because it definitely has potential as a portable puzzler. Until then, I’ll be one of the lone (or at least very, very few) gamers in the States who will be hording away hundreds upon hundreds of hours of picture-coloring puzzle fun.