Sungrand has never been a studio to repeat a formula or make the same game twice. Their flagship series, Silver Falls, spans numerous genres from traditional survival horror to platforming to survival construction to action RPG. I’ve come to expect new and novel experiences from Sungrand’s games, but even I didn’t expect them to release a homebrew “get drunk and make out” simulator for the DS. Silver Falls: Makeout Miracle Mania is a dating sim that has you try to match up the denizens of Silver Falls through a mixture of latent attraction, good vibes, and a lot of alcohol. The premise of the game is that the Dusty Cactus, the local bar, has a new mixed drink with some...interesting side effects. In addition to the normal inebriating effects of alcohol, this drink seems to have a strange libido-increasing quality. You have to figure out, through trial and error or having a little bit of background knowledge of the characters and their personalities, who is going to be willing to swap spit with whom. It’s a pretty unique concept in my experience as most dating sims I’ve played are about figuring out how to make your chosen character fall in love with the player character; this one, on the other hand, has set “right” and “wrong” choices, and what you have to figure out is what’s the right match up and what’s the wrong match up. The gameplay is also really unique. To my knowledge, there isn’t another DS game quite like this one. Like BrainAge or Silver Falls Gaiden: Deathly Delusion Destroyers, you hold the DS sideways like a book. At the start of the game, you have a certain amount of money - $6 when you first play and then $8 in subsequent rounds - to spend on drinks and sandwiches. You’ll have random pairs of characters, and while I didn’t count, it’s somewhere around 15 pairs until the bar closes and the game ends. With each pair, you can have them share a sandwich, have them share a drink, or have them kiss. To have them share a drink or a sandwich, you just tap the correct icon on the touch screen. This is where it gets unique, though; to have them kiss, you have to close the DS and re-open it; when you close it, you’re making them kiss because the character images are pressed together face to face when the two screens come together while closed. It’s super clever, and I don’t personally know of another DS game that includes closing the clamshell as a core mechanic. What the kissing mechanism being a core mechanic means, though, that the only way to play this and really experience the true game is to get an R4 card that will work with it and play it on an actual DS or clamshell 3DS; an emulator won’t really work except for DeSmuME, a 2DS won’t really work, and turning the ROM into a VC title to inject into a CFW Wii U won’t really work. I say “an R4 card that works” because the one I had, a 2018 R4 Gold card, wouldn’t load it for some reason. And no, it’s not a “time bomb” issue; my card doesn’t have that problem. What I ended up doing is going on Amazon and buying an Ace3DSX card, allegedly the best DS SD cartridge on the market. It works perfectly with that card, but I have no idea why the Ace3DSX works with this ROM and the R4 Gold doesn’t when it’s worked with every other game I’ve tried. The goal of the game is to get as high a rating by the end of the night as possible. To do this, you need to get your Vibe meter and your Romance meter as high as possible. Vibe is increased by having characters share drinks and sandwiches so long as those characters both like sharing them with each other. Romance is increased by having characters who are attracted to one another kiss. Because there are ten Silver Falls characters included, that’s 100 different possible match ups. That means two things for the player. First and foremost, you will only get a small fraction of possible pairings in a single game. Second, you’ll never remember who likes what with whom. How much a character likes something is denoted by how many hearts appear, and if they don’t like it, you’ll see a frowning face and anime-esque frustration clouds. The reactions are not always going to be reciprocal, either. Take Karn and Bull, for example. When you make them kiss, Karn gets 4 hearts, but Bull just gets pissed off. What I did was go all late 80s Metroid on it; I made a spreadsheet with each possible character combination and, as I played game after game, used trial and error to record what worked with whom. Even having played over a dozen games yesterday, there are still a handful of combinations I haven’t gotten, and there were few instances where I got the same pairing twice in a row. On the one hand, that means your success is somewhat dependent on luck. You can only buy so many sandwiches and drinks, and you have to guess how much of each you’ll need. If you get pairings that hate drinking together and kissing, but you didn’t buy enough sandwiches, oh well, guess you have to piss them off and lower your Romance and Vibe meters. If you have characters who hate kissing but LOVE sharing drinks with each other, but you’re out of drinks, the best you can do is tread water by having them share a sandwich - something few seem to dislike - and essentially waste a turn. There’s definitely strategy here with resource management, but it’s just as much based on luck as it is strategy. Silver Falls: Makeout Miracle Mania is a WEIRD game. It’s a fun weird, though. If you’ve played Mount Your Friends or Baby Maker Extreme on the old Xbox 360 Indie storefront, that’s sort of the kind of weird this is. You’ll be constantly asking yourself “Why the hell did he make this game?” and simultaneously be unable to stop playing because there’s something about it that just hooks you. It’s a free homebrew download, so you don’t have to go hunt for it or make sure there’s money in your eShop account or anything, but since it does require an R4 card to work - Twilight on modded 3DSs doesn’t seem to work with this game - the barrier to entry, while low, is a little different than most homebrew Silver Falls games. Still, though, an R4 card isn’t expensive and is, in my opinion, a great investment for DS enthusiasts anyway, so if you have one, give this game a shot, and if you don’t have one, go online and order one and THEN give this game a shot. If simply for its unique and novel concept and mechanics alone, it’s absolutely worth checking out. My Rating - B |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
June 2024
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