Face it. Videogames are emotionally stunted.

Yeah, they’ve made us laugh, they’ve given us shocks and adrenaline rushes, cheap titillation and even cheaper double entendre, they’ve even made us cry – with frustration if not through deft manipulation of our emotions (although they’ve done that too). But have they ever made us fall in love?

“Oh, my darling. Come away with me”.
“Wow. Look at that – white dogshit!”

Love stories are hard to make believable, and most people who try don’t succeed (Richard Curtis – I’m looking at you here). Love stories need well developed and well rounded characters. They need real people, with real hopes, desires and secrets. They need loss and sadness and tragedy because otherwise they’re little more than emotional pornography.

Sure, Videogames have done relationships before. Mario & Peach, Sonic & whatserface, Larry Laffer & Passionate Patti, erm, Ratchett & Clank… Well, you get the point. They’re either laughably sexless affairs, crude sketches of a relationship or thinly veiled plot devices of the ‘get the girl, kill the baddies’ school of thought. Videogames, for all their pytotechnics and exquisitely modelled anatomies, are romantically stuck in the over-exaggerated mannerisms of Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford.

“Your breasts are making blood flow into my penis”…
“Shit off, shorty”.

Which is where Feel the Magic comes in. Disquietingly, it starts more like Virtua Stalker than Virtua Lover but after a while it becomes that simplest, and hardest, of things – a little, almost inconsequential, love story. A story of a boy, a girl and how a chance meeting leads them both to discover what has been missing from their lives.

The story itself is told in simple, four-frame, cut-scenes but the emotion is saved for the games themselves. All controlled exclusively via the touchpad, and a remarkably effective advert for the two-screen touchy-feely power of the DS.

There are reaction games, where you have to tap things (scorpions, bulls, custard pies) with the stylus before they hurt the girl. There are games where you have to gently clean mud off her, or when you have to follow increasingly tricky paths along glorified versions of those buzzer games you hated when you were a kid. There are games which are seemingly designed with the express purpose of public humiliation (shouting into the microphone of your DS is a game experience destined to remain private) and there is one interminable section which consists of a seemingly never ending parade of boss battles. So far, so Wario Ware.

“Hang on. We’re being exploited…”
“Fuck it. It’s warm”.

But it’s not the games that will stick in your mind.

It’s all about the girl y’see, and the games that directly involve the girl are the ones you’ll return to. They’re almost all laughably simple affairs – hold her hand, pop the buttons on her dress, wipe mud off her face, find her earrings – but they work precisely because they’re so simple. The gentle swaying motion (pausing only to swat some unexplained bees away) of walking through the park holding your girl’s hand feels exactly as it should. It feels like a date.

Stealth smut. The bit where you have to rummage
around and find the girl’s ring.

But the conventions of the form are too strong. Maybe Sega thinks we’d feel cheated if there wasn’t a Big Bad Guy to defeat? But the bad guy does eventually turn up and, for reasons that are never adequately explained, the game descends into Boss Battle Hell in the latter stages.

*Spoiler WARNING*
(Read-on with, umm, caution or something please.)

Which is when Feel The Magic pulls its master stroke. Just as your initial love affair with the game mechanic starts to wane, as the memories of the sheer charm of the best scenes fades to a nothing more than a pleasant dream. Just when you’re beginning to not care… The girl dies. You’re too late, you’re too slow, you’re just not good enough.

It is a breath-taking moment.

“Goddammit, you bitch. You’ve never backed away from
anything in your life. Now FIGHT!”

It is nothing compared to what comes next. We all know how to revive someone who has stopped breathing, don’t we? We’ve all seen the films, we’ve all practised on St John’s Ambulance dummys and we all tried to get partnered with the pretty girls in our school first aid lessons. This is way beyond games, we just know what to do. Breathe five times, pump the heart five times, breathe again, pump again, check the pulse, breathe, pump, repeat. Feel the Magic’s recreation of actual, real-life, CPR skills is one of videogaming’s finest moments. It’s something you’ll remember for the rest of your life, it’s something you will want to show everyone else. It’s magic.

February 2005

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