Game Connection 2015: Hands-on with The Antiques Affair, the only game here about gluing broken teapots
Tea for two
Bonjour! Mark's at Game Connection and Paris Games Week, looking for cool mobile games and trying to remember his GCSE French lessons. He'll share what he finds throughout the week
Doesn't it just? This is a game about dusty relics and shattered pottery, that developer Tickity Boom Games describes as a cross between The Antiques Roadshow and Pokemon.
How does it work?So you get various jobs. Find this person a teapot. Get that person an 18th century vase. Whatever. You then send your people out to find or buy antiques - and then wait around for a few minutes or hours until they return.
Unfortunately, the antique normally comes back in a dozen pieces (you should never ship with Yodel). Fortunately, this means you get to play a fun 3D jigsaw mini-game where you glue the pieces back together.
Next, you'll need to make sure your find is genuine by scouting for telltale signs like serial numbers and production marks. And finally you'll value the antique.
What's the Pokemon connection?
Well, finding antiques will of course let you complete jobs and objectives, but you also get to fill your collection of dusty old-world goodies. Part of the thrill of the game is seeing a bunch of real-world antiques on the shelf.
Real-world?Oh yeah, these are proper artifacts and they all come with loads of details and data on their history and the types of people that would use them. There's more information on this teapots in this game than you ever thought possible.
Tickity Boom describes this stuff as fact candy, or fact porn - depending on your sensibility.
This sounds cool. How did it come about?
It does sound cool! And it came from two places, I gather. One is a desire for the largely female-based staff of Tickity Boom to make games that appeal directly to a female audience.
And the other is that the game's design director, Anna Marsh, worked on Tomb Raider Anniversary for Wii, which featured a pottery puzzle mini-game. That idea was expanded to make this game.
I like the cut of this game's jib. When's it out?Uhhhh, good question. It's out on Windows tablets now. I forgot to ask whether it's coming to iOS and Android. God I'm bad at my job. We'll find out.
