Play dating

It’s been five straight hours of intense gaming. Your stats are all maxed out, you have every last piece of equipment and have mastered the best combos. Coming up on the final level, you can feel the tension building up like a powerful jumbo jet engine. The end is in sight and as the climax approaches, you reach for your best weapons and… kiss the prettiest girl in town?

That unorthodox finale is usually separated by an intense boss battle in adventure or role-playing games. For dating simulators, the big kiss is the ultimate goal and there’s no fighting to be had.

Dating sims are much like any other real-world simulator that you’ve played, only the focus is entirely on trying to make sense of the dating world around you. This genre is wildly popular in Japan, but dating sims haven’t made much of an impression on American gamers.

Perhaps it’s because the male-dominated videogame market of America is driven by high-powered celebrity endorsements, especially among sports games. When Shaun Alexander and Allen Iverson appear on the covers of big-name sports games (Madden 2007 and NBA 2K7, respectively), the typical testosterone-driven man-gamers huddle around to talk trash and bellow at the screen. This key demographic doesn’t take nearly as much time to practice their macking, so dating sims have had a hard time finding a niche in the States.

Another problem for stateside dating sims is male emasculation. Where Japanese gamers see humor and even some valuable instruction in dating sims, American gamers just see shame that someone would rather be the pimp of pixel town instead of taking a real-live lady out.

The biggest problem with American dating sims is not having a flagship series. If you think of RPGs, Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior and Xenosaga jump to mind. If I say first-person shooter, you say Halo or Call of Duty. If someone starts discussing dating sims, the room gets quiet, leaving most people thinking, “what the hell is a dating sim?”

This isn’t a problem in Japan, where far and away the most popular dating sim is the Tokimeki Memorial series or TokiMemo, as fanboys call it. These games have the traditional setup of a dating sim: the main character is in high school, where he spends his time playing sports or in class in order to build “attraction” attributes that, as they increase, score him prettier and smarter girls for dates.

Mini-games take place between dates to help you increase your attractiveness, opening up more dating opportunities. Dates progress according to what multiple-choice dialogue you select on a date, and if you play it cool, your love interest–represented in TokiMemo as a Love Meter–will increase. If you make a fool of yourself, your overall attractiveness and Love Meter will drop.

This adventurous approach to dating is the basis for Brooktown High, America’s newest dating sim.

It’s rated Teen for some mild adult humor–sorry, no erotic scenes here–and is available exclusively on the PlayStation Portable (PSP). The graphics and sound are decent for a PSP game, though the content isn’t going to revolutionize the American market. Too much of the dating conversation is repetitive and forced, and it feels as though the script writers were inspired by a John Hughes marathon.

There are some occasional moments of cute, cheesy humor, especially in the reaction shots. Doing well on a date or after attempting a kiss will cut to green lights or thumbs-up animations, whereas totally blowing a date or smooch will bring up a video of a skater biffing it painfully.

Brooktown High feels like it was tailored for a high school nerd that wonders about life at the top of the social stratosphere. Time spent in the hallways and in dating hot spots will remind you of your own high school dating, as this sim does a decent job of capturing the moment-to-moment drama of real life high school interactions.

That’s about all it does, however, and the dates that go wrong wind up being a lot more entertaining than the successful ones. All in all, you’ll probably want to avoid Brooktown High unless remembering what it was like to date before you could drive sounds like an intriguing way to spend your time.