Your villagers look nothing like these guys

Since Konami won’t release another Lost in Blue game, I’ve been forced to look for acceptable substitutes. Candidate number one: Virtual Villagers: A New Home for the Nintendo DS.

A group of villagers from an island destroyed by a volcano settle on a new island. It’s up to you to make sure they can survive.

Controls are usually done via the touchscreen+stylus. Drag and drop villagers next to an item and they’ll carry out a related action. E.g. drop them next to the ocean and they’ll start fishing. Drop them next to a hut that needs repair and they’ll start fixing it. And drop a male and female on top of each other (under the right conditions) and they’ll head off to a hut to make babies.

Virtual Villagers DS is a simple game with two major flaws that made me quit after two days. The first one is its very simplicity. There simply aren’t that many actions your characters can take. Fish, farm, build, research, breed, worship, take care of kids, that’s pretty much it. While they require “food”, they don’t actually eat or sleep.

That lying game cover on the left shows a guy offering a girl a fish. That doesn’t happen. It shows a boy lighting a fire. That hasn’t happened in my game so far. Nobody has picked up a monkey either. Nobody’s blonde or red-haired or tanned either. About the only accurate thing in that picture is the woman carrying a basket of berries. That’s what my villagers have subsisted on for 53 years: berries and fish. Balanced nutrition? Wot dat?

Almost all the things you’d need to worry about on a desert island are ignored in this game.

A Safe source of water? Your villagers don’t drink.

A Balanced diet? Safe sources of food? Like I said, berries and fish and later bananas. All presumably eaten raw.

Shelter? They build huts, but they don’t live in them, even in bad weather. Sunstroke? Wot dat?

Fire? Light? They hang around outside even through the middle of the night. Presumably they can see in the dark.

Dangerous animals? None.

Sanitation? Nobody poops or pees. Or showers, for that matter.

Inbreeding? You start out with 6 villagers. It’s a necessary evil. They’re prudish enough not to mate before age 18, but fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles, everything that moves is fair game.

Seriously, my villagers have got things good. Which is good for them and bad for me, because they’re not very exciting to manage.

The second, and main flaw of the game is the time lapse system coupled with the sheer stupidity of the AI. Building huts, making babies, researching technology all takes so long that it’s pointless to just sit there and watch them. Since time passes even when the game is turned off, in an ideal world you could set everyone a task, leave for a bit and come back to find them completed.

That’s in the ideal world. On Planet Earth, when you turn Virtual Villagers on the next morning, you’re far more likely discover half your villagers dead and the other half deadly sick. Anyone who isn’t sick will either be goofing off or doing a task you never asked them to do. Even if you train a couple of healers, they’ll just stand by and let the others die. Builders will hang around while the huts fall into disrepair. Men and women will laze about when they should be breeding. So that’s where all the challenge went: keeping your moronic populace from dying of idiotus nobrainus syndrome.

The killing blow for me was the arbitrary set of “puzzles” you had to solve to progress. If “progress” is indeed the word. For one of them, I needed an expert builder to knock down a door so I could explore the rest of the island. Btw, the game never tells you this. You have to drag characters of various occupations all over the island until somebody triggers something somehow. Or, more sensibly, read a FAQ. So I set my adept builder to work on a hut, turned the game off, and then I came back he’d reached expert builder and died almost immediately after just to spite me.

Anyway, I stuck it out for a little longer. Got that door open eventually, explored a bit, got 16 villagers now, but all the fun is gone. In fact it was never there to begin with, and I was just deceiving myself. I have a lot of other games to play this year, and there are some great games coming out on PSP in the next few weeks (Suikoden Hyakunen, Atelier Elkrone, Tales of the Heroes, Shining Blade) so I can’t afford to waste time here. Good luck on the island, folks!

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