Touch Detective is still awesome

I've mentioned these games before on deviantart, but the Touch Detective games on the Nintendo DS are truly gaming masterpieces. They are fun, and have great characters with very established personalities.

The Touch Detective games have great writing, and are really funny. Touch Detective is definitely the funniest game I've played on the DS simply because of it's great writing, and just the way the dialogue is set up. The main character (Mackenzie) talks to people on the lower screen, but on the upper screen you can see what she is thinking during these conversations. This results in a lot of hilarious, yet subtle humour that really stands out. Of course the humour isn't limited to those thoughts. The conversations the characters have are funny too. The jokes are very subtle, and a lot of times they aren't even jokes at all. More often than not it's just how the characters react to the other characters that is so funny.

For instance, Mackenzie's friend Penelope is telling Mackenzie about a girl on the upper floor of the condo she lives in. Penelope says "She likes Hot Chocolate Milk. I personally don't like my Chocolate Milk to be hot." Then Mackenzie thinks to herself in the upper screen "Does she mean Hot Chocolate?"

It's very subtle stuff like that which is so funny. If you've ever watched or read Azumanga Daioh, Mackenzie's joke telling is a bit like Yomi's. Mackenzie points out the things the other character say that either don't make sense, or are wrong. Mackenzie also has other ways of being funny though, and doesn't rely on other characters' mistakes to be funny.

The art style is really great too, and the characters have very unique designs that make them all very different.

Touch Detective is a somewhat frustrating game the first time though since it IS pretty hard to figure out what to do next, but once you know how to do everything, THAT'S when this game becomes so great. I like to think of Touch Detective as a comedy detective TV show rather than a game. Touch Detective really is at it's best when you can see all of the humourous dialogue soon after each other. The first time through, you see some funny stuff, then you're stuck for 20 minutes. Once you finally figure out what to do, you see more funny stuff, then are stuck for 20 minutes. This really disrupts the flow of the humour when played like this, and once you know how to do everything and can see it all in a row, you'll find it a lot more enjoyable.

I've been stressed out lately, but after I popped Touch Detective into the DS, I was feeling great. Beating the game will be hard the first time, but it's really fun the second time.