III: Archime-DS

Despite being published by Skip, and made by Skip employees and freelance artists who have an association with Skip, Archime-DS is not a Skip game. It’s a Route 24 game, Route 24 being the one-man company that Kenichi Nishi runs out of his apartment. He enlisted three friends to help him make Archime-DS, working for free – assumably with the power of hypnosis, or perhaps by making them promises with his eyes. His friends are hikarin and Fumihiro Kanaya, whom we’ve already met, and Hirofumi Taniguchi, the composer and sound designer of Giftpia. (If you’ve played Giftpia, you will agree that being its composer and sound designer makes you a magnificent, godlike person.)

Archime-DS is not so much a game as an interface through which a game can be played. Before you roll your eyes and go “Pfft!” at that, consider that the same description applies to a Monopoly set or a deck of cards. And like Monopoly and non-pathetic card games, Archime-DS must be played in a group – there is no single-player. Don’t worry, though – four players only need one copy of the game, and it’s cheap as 2,100 yen chips. Here’s how Archime-DS works:

The person whose turn it is writes a question or a challenge, or something like that, and sends it to all the players, including himself. Everyone writes or draws the funniest response they can think of, and then, each player secretly votes for the response they thought was best. The player with the most votes wins the round, and a new round begins.

That’s it. It’s really, really fun.

Well, we had fun, at least. When you download Archime-DS via the DS menu, it tells you, “If you think this game is boring, then you are the boring one.” Clearly this is the best slogan ever. What it comes down to is that if you play Archime-DS with fun, creative people whose company you enjoy, you’ll have a great time. Like a good Pictochat session, an ongoing game of Archime-DS becomes a sort of second layer of conversation, with its own ideas and running jokes that intersect with and complement the first one, and vice versa.

Our game with Skip at Design Festa opened with a challenge to draw Mickey Mouse. Our hideous Mickey Mouse drawings became a running gag that influenced our verbal conversation, and soon didn’t make any sense without the verbal conversation to give it context. Then our conversation topic changed to Mr Squiggle, which of course fed back into the game.

To not only meet Kenichi Nishi and his creative team, and hit it off and have a great conversation with them, but to do so with the help of a tool that they had created for that very purpose... Well! Well.

I guess you had to be there.

“Patrick,” you are saying to me, wiggling your toes in frustration and despair, “that sounds like a fun party game, but why can’t my friends and I play it with just pens and scrap paper?”

I can think of two good reasons. (Good question, though!) Reason #1:

YOU: Hey gang, I know a fun and wholesome party game we can play, and all we need is pens, paper, and our imaginations!

YOUR COOL FRIENDS: No. Stop being a dork.

YOU: Okay then, how about we play my new DS game?

YOUR COOL FRIENDS: Yaaaaay!

Reason #2:

With Giftpia’s design leads (hikarin and Hirofumi Taniguchi) returning in the same roles for Archime-DS, of course Archime-DS is a wonderfully presented game; strange and colourful and just shy of cute. There is cool music, and there are weird little critters. In fact, while you’re waiting for a player to think of a challenge, you can whack critters for meaningless points. If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, well, it’s not! So if you don’t want to whack critters – hey, no pressure!

I dunno; works for me.

We’re almost at the end of my story. If Archime-DS sounds like a fun thing to you, why not add it to your order, the next time you’re importing games from Japan? It’s cheap, it has an English mode, and it looks like this:

Your copy might not be signed, though.

FINAL SCORE: BEST FRIENDS FOREVER

THE END OF MY STORY: Becca and I promised to meet with Kenichi and the gang for beer and misadventures, next time we visited Tokyo. Well, I’ll be in Tokyo next week, and before we head out together for the evening, I’ll be interviewing the Archime-DS team for Eegra. So if you have any questions you’d like me to ask, post them on this forum thread, or email them to me, and I’ll see what I can do. Stay tuned for Skip-related excitement!