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QuickSpot is the Nintendo DS equivalent of that brain-teasing feature in the Sunday comics, where you look at two cartoons and pick out the five things that aren’t alike between them. Seriously, that’s all it is. Look at the top screen, look at the bottom screen, circle the extra bit of the picture with the stylus, then do it over again. Many times.

The idea seems to have been to follow in the footsteps of Nintendo’s Brain Age, leaving aside the fact that Brain Age involved many different mini-games, instead of just one very simple idea. Namco does more with the one idea than you’d expect, but there’s only so much to be done.

The Circle Chase

In the single-player game, there are two modes available. One, Rapid Mode, involves finding a single difference very quickly, while Focus Mode has lots of little differences to find over time. Boss stages in Rapid Mode are a little bit tougher – you have to scrape or blow away little obstacles to get at an unobscured image – but the basic challenge is the same.

The Brain Age kink comes in at the end of every stage, where the game analyzes the neatness and quickness of your circling. Based on how fast you picked out those little differences, it’ll tell you how well you’re doing in five different areas of brain activity. Scribble fast and perhaps you have high Intuition. Scribble sloppy and it could be your concentration’s slipping. This is the idea in theory, anyway, although it seems a pretty imprecise method of mind-reading.

Exactly how accurate the game’s judgment might be is a question you can ponder for yourself. It’s telling, perhaps, that outside the main game, there’s also a bonus fortune-telling mode. Circle a couple of images and the game will go so far as to extrapolate your outlook on life, love, and whatever else. It’s true that your handwriting reveals a little something about your personality, but this is going pretty far over the edge.

Funny Pages

To Namco’s credit, a lot of the artwork is pretty neat stuff. It runs from abstract cartooning to highly detailed and realistic images, with a lot of pictures looking like the work of professional Japanese comic artists. For the hardcore gamers who might have picked the game up by accident, there are cartoons and bits of concept artwork based on popular new-school Namco games (like Katamari Damacy), as well as collections of old-school sprite artwork from classics like Tower of Druaga.

On the down side, there’s not quite enough artwork to go around. If something like this is going to even have a chance at working, it had better not repeat itself for a long, long time. QuickSpot repeats itself within the first couple of stages, often with some of the easiest challenges in the game. Yes, it’s supposed to ramp up over time, but even assuming a target audience of toddlers and the senile, the default level of difficulty is ridiculous.

Adding insult to injury, many nominally different images just repeat the same basic gimmick. For instance, there’s more than a couple of cases where somebody’s simply holding a banana in the bottom image. Bananas are inherently funny, perhaps, but not enough to shake that eerie feeling of déjà vu.

Pass It Around

You might not believe it, but Namco also managed to squeeze a couple of multiplayer games out of this one. There’s a head-to-head mode where two players try to clear a single image as fast as possible, and a hot-potato party mode where you pass the DS in a circle. (A la Rapid Mode, the first player to miss the time limit loses.) Clever though they are, these are fun for a few minutes at the outside. Neither of them is going to make anyone forget Mario Kart.

QuickSpot does come at a relative bargain price, $19.99 compared to $10 or $20 more for most DS games. Brain Age dropped at the same price point, though, and has a lot more in the package to justify its existence. (Namco had the gall to charge more than $30 a copy in Japan, and somehow the game was still successful enough to spawn a sequel at the very same price. The mysteries of the Orient remain as inscrutable as ever.)

This is more in the line of a free Flash game on the web, or something Namco could have pitched at DS download kiosks. At a reasonable price, it would have been a charming little novelty. It’s not 20 bucks worth of boxed retail product, though. Sadly, Namco can’t seem to tell the difference.

Article by: D. F. Smith