CHENNAI : The end of the year marks the time for some reflection and then some guilt that you’ve still not achieved most of the goals you set for yourself this year. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t celebrate or look forward to spending some productive hours on the exciting games that we could play the following year.
Obviously, we can’t not test out ‘TemTem’. It is the next massively-online Pokemon-wannabe multiplayer which has a very detailed explanation of their game idea in a very cutesy Kickstarter page. Their website clearly says that the game is “inspired by Pokemon”, but I didn’t expect the inspiration to reach an extent of similarity as to a) have a slightly remixed version of the old-school Game Boy Pokemon music themes, b) have creatures that are just slightly colour-corrected versions of actual Pokemon themselves, c) creatively re-christen what might have been Team Rocket as Clan Belsoto, d) convert what we know as ‘gym leaders’ to ‘dojo leaders’ and e) Trainers are now unabashed ‘Tamers’.
But I am not complaining. We’ve never had a suitable competitor to the Pokemon games that we’ve grown up with. TemTem seems like a massively-modified, massively-online alternate to Pokemon (remember, Pokemon never had an MMO, even after all these years). Apart from this, the top reason to play a wannabe-Pokemon game is that the game won’t be restricted to a Nintendo console.
I understand though, that not a lot of us are looking for a Pokemon alternate. Some of us are awaiting an alternate to Pokemon Go. Not to worry, there’s something for us too - ‘The Walking Dead: Our World’ and ‘The Jurassic World: Alive’.
This is all great for zombie killing aficionados and fans of scientists (because the game is about DNA collection and needle throwing more than finding dinosaurs). As a faithful Potterhead, I’m still holding out for some version of capturing ‘Fantastic Beasts’ by the time the final movie releases. There, I had completely forgotten (for the last minute, so did you) about the number of evenings wasted this year in watching sitcom reruns and non-Chicken Dinner PUBG games. Let’s aim for less regret and more forced-fun this following year.