Re: Koetist: The Student Developed Voice Acting DS Game

Nintendo has a new set of student developed DS games from their 2008 game seminar. Re: Koetist, a voice acting game with a talking camcorder as your guide, is one of them.

Re: Koetist has players read text off slides and the microphone records what you say. A bar on the bottom of the screen lets you know how much recording time is left. You usually get a couple of seconds per line. The amusing bit about Re: Koetist is the lines you record don’t always correspond to the slide which leads to hilarious results. When you start the game you record “henshin” (transform) which is used on the slide for a transforming fox. The same sound byte is later used for a business man that “transforms” into a girl’s school uniform.

Most of the stories in Re: Koetist are silly. Cookman is about a transforming hero battling in a giant octopus that gets vaporized into takoyaki. Oh, look there’s that henshin sound byte again. It’s used when Cookman transforms.

Other stories include a romantic scene, a fantasy battle, and a power plant on the verge of meltdown. You can voice the script as it is written, but Re: Koetist is just as fun if you play it like Madlibs and improvise. Either way you end up with ridiculous results to laugh about.

Other than voice acting there isn’t anything else to Re: Koetist. You can’t lose… I guess if you can’t read the line fast enough you can screw up the scene, but you’ll never see a Game Over. The point of Re: Koetist isn’t winning or losing anyway it’s a game designed to make you giggle.

Food for thought:

1.) The number of sound bytes Re: Koetist can save was more than I expected. Every single recorded line is stored in the DS’ memory and reused in the final story about a power plant meltdown. Remember, as a downloadable Nintendo DS game Re: Koetist is stored in temporary flash memory.

2.) Nintendo could sell Re: Koetist into a downloadable DSiWare game. On second thought they should make a DSiWare version of Re: Koetist with user created slides and stories made with the Moving Memo Pad application.