Game Review: Time Hollow (Konami, Nintendo DS)

I'm branching out into occasional games reviews (as heck, I don't do anything else with this blog...)

First up, a game I just imported from the US.

Time Hollow

Time Hollow (Konami) is another one of the rather spiffy range of Japanese graphical adventure games that are available for the Nintendo DS. (See also: Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Trace Memory/Another Code, Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice, Professor Layton - well, it is, even if the puzzle solving aspect is a little more "in-your-face" than normal - and so on).

To be honest, "adventure game" is possibly a bit much for this one, it's much more of a visual novel than some of the others. Hotel Dusk, for example, is slightly more non-linear and has a lot more possible endings based on some of your choices. The same is true of Trace Memory/Another Code. The Phoenix Wright/Apollo Justice games are as linear but much more "work" to proceed through. Time Hollow is very linear (although once you've played through it once there are some options to do things differently second time through, plus an alternative path through the game which is very, very clever) and not difficult at all to proceed through.

I won't go into the plot too much, partially because it would probably be spoileriffic but more because it's pretty complex and would require the use of a blackboard in "Back to the Future II" style. Basically, towards the start the hero gets a widget that allows small windows to be opened into the past, small things to be changed, and then the changes to the timeline become the current reality. The hero spends most of the game avoiding various crises, finding out where, when and how things need to be changed, manipulating the past to change the present, and then usually finding out that the present is still not optimal and having to change the past again at a different point or in a different way.

This means the linearity of the game is in some ways an advantage; if it was more open it would be very, very confusing indeed and you could easily become impossibly stuck. Instead it does play like an interactive novel with the plot being driven onwards by your actions. At key plot points there's animated cutscenes that are actually fairly decently voiced and reaching them feels very rewarding.

I did have a couple of occasions where the interface annoyed me; one was that during "plot" conversations you usually have to ask the person the same conversation option twice to get all the information out of them, and the other was the problem endemic to this type of game - not finding the "something" in the environment that you need to click on to get anywhere, and hence being stuck. Thankfully such moments are rare in Time Hollow - the game tends not to let you leave a conversation or a room if there's something you haven't yet done. There are a few periods of going through all the locations just to find out where to go next, but the writers seem to recognise this and often you'll find something or someone unexpected when doing so.

It's not a superb game but it's a very good example of the "visual novel" genre. The time manipulation aspects of it excellent; if you think of your favourite clichéd time travel plot points from films and TV you'll find most of them here, apart from becoming your own grandfather (at least not that I noticed). The plot is intriguing, none of the characters are actively annoying (although most do have bad haircuts), the animated cutscenes are engaging, the occasional voice acting is not bad at all, and the J-Pop theme tune is catchy. The in-game music is as irritating as in-game music normally is though...

Weirdly, I just checked the European PEGI rating for the upcoming European release and it's 7+ (and 6+ in Portugal, oddly). The US ESRB rating is T (Teen) and the Japanese CERO rating is 12+. It's both too complex and too violent by far for a 7+, I'd say. Nasty things happen to people in the game, and even if they end up not counting because time is edited they could still be an issue for younger children. (The Phoenix Wright games and Trace Memory/Another Code are the same - 12+/T in Japan/US, 7+ for PEGI. Only Hotel Dusk: Room 215 seems to be 12+ everywhere. Odd.)

Overall, certainly worth a look. It's not much of a game, but it is a very good story well executed.

Some Timelapse Silent Movies

At some point I'll need to find a source of copyright-free/creative commons music to use for this kind of thing...

Anyhoo, here's some timelapse videos "what I haf made mesel'", using the mahhhhvelous CHDK firmware (see earlier post). One of cress which is a bit dodgy; the PowerShot A560 has one major issue in that the tripod mount is on the extreme left of the camera, so smaller tripods have a tendency to fall over. So the cress was done with the camera resting on a small tube of ducttape and far too close - the focus goes all over the shop. The ice ones are better. For some reason only the Ice Melting video has a "high quality" version on YouTube...

Testing from the iPhone

And now... A flying pig, origami style.

Testing adding entries from Flock...

Just to see if Flock's inbuilt blog posting thingy works...

Timelapse Photography and CHDK

A month or so ago I nabbed a cheap Canon PowerShot A560 to use as a "experimental" camera. It's higher spec than our trusty Ixus 50 but it's a bit too chunky for holiday snap use. So why did I get it?

Well, it's pretty much for two reasons - first, it has a fairly standard DC power socket. The Ixus doesn't - you need to get a replacement "battery" with a socket in it, and while cheap power supplies that will fit the A560 are available you can't get those battery-alikes for reasonable amounts of cash.

Why the power socket? Well, timelapse photography (of course). While I can stick an 8GB SDHC card in the camera and get 18,000 or so 1600x1200 shots I can't get AA cells that will last the couple of weeks that will take at one shot every couple of minutes...

The other reason is that the PowerShot A560 is one of the Canon range that can use the excellent CHDK firmware extension to add a whole bunch of higher-end features to the camera and a scripting language that can do motion detection, long exposures, and intervalometers - the latter means easy-as-pie timelapse photography.

So for the past few days I've been taking pictures of cress. The results aren't perfect; I didn't have a decent tripod (one problem with the A560 is that the tripod mount is way off to one side of the camera so my little tripod toppled over) so I had to rest the camera too close to the cress in macro mode, which means that the focus is a bit flickery. A second problem is that the images number from 0001 to 9999 - that's a slight issue when you have over 9999 images. The camera handles it okay, creating a new subdirectory for every 2000 images, but I need to find a way to rename the images later to get a single sequence. Anyway, I've done a test render of 9999 frames and it works fine so at some point I'll post it to YouTube.

I also plan to do a couple of videos explaining how to do various things (install CHDK, create timelapse, etc) which I'll also post.