Recently a friend of mine mentioned that he was having a great time playing Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck for the Nintendo DS, a game we developed a couple of years ago based on the classic Daffy Duck cartoon.
“I love the part you play with the DS closed.”
Ah, nice! I thought. I dig getting compliments about this part of the game because it’s one of my favorite parts too. Typically, when you close your DS mid-game, it simply puts your game into “sleep” mode in order to save your battery. In Duck Amuck DS we instead made a short game out of it: Basically, when you close your DS and then open it up again you see a brief animated intro where Daffy rants about a huge, terrifying monster he just spotted. He then pulls out a huge cartoon mallet and instructs you to close your DS again so he can go a-hunting for it.
While the DS is closed, you hear Daffy yap orders to press the left and right-shoulder buttons as a way to help lead him to the creature. When at last he yells, “Open up!” his find is revealed. If you did well following his instructions, you see that he has found the creature (who turns out to be Gossamer from Looney Tunes).
Although a lot of players (and reviewers too) seem to really like this part of the game, there is one question that always comes up: “So how come you made it so that it can only be played once a day?”
AARGH! Alas, this is the game’s critical fault…the one thing I would change if only I could! It makes no sense. Why would we allow the player to only enjoy it once every 24 hours?
Well, here is where I set the record straight: The truth is we were required by Nintendo to put a limit on how many times the player could play this game...only once per day. Their reasoning for it was to avoid the extra wear-and-tear that opening and closing the DS over and over would put upon the hinges of the players’ DSs. My argument back to them was fruitless of course, but it went something like this: "the MORE wear-and-tear the better, I say!" "Make ‘em wear ‘em out, I say!" "Planned obsolescence, I say!"
In the end I see that Nintendo has to control the quality of their hardware. And really who am I to blame them? I just wanted this part of the game to go in as planned so the world could see how brazenly clever we are! The lesson? Sometimes even the best intentions of game design can unexpectedly run a little bit amuck.
Image Source: Looney Tunes: Duck Amuck DS
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