THE WAR-DRIVER’S DELIGHT: WIFI TREASURE HUNTING IN ASPYR’S TREASURE WORLD
The most important thing you need to know about Treasure World — the just-released DS game from developer Aspyr — is that it, and by it I mean the actual DS cart that you snap in and execute — is not the game, it is the tool. The game is out there, and by out there I mean the actual away-from-the-internet world, with your DS just the conduit that makes the magic happen.
The second most important thing you need to know is that it is essentially a little bit of magic — which may come as less of a surprise when you remember that it’s the brainchild of Justin Leingang, developer of the recently covered and similarly magical Glum Buster — and one of the best prestidigitations we’ve seen someone conjure for the handheld, or any handheld, to date.
Here’s the storybook premise: a Star Sweep — he’s the beardy one whose facial hair not coincidentally is teased into the shape of a star — crash-lands onto Earth alongside his robo-sidekick the Wish Finder. In order to get the necessary fuel to re-power Halley, his starship, he needs you to help him collect star dust. In return, he’ll trade you some of his vast collection of some 2500+ treasures, 20 star-dust-currency-units at a time.
How do you collect star-dust? By setting the Wish Finder to hunt for treasure by taking your DS out into the wild, where it can scan stars — stars here meaning the thousands of now-ubiquitous Wi-Fi signals that canvas and cloud every major metropolitan city. The DS catalogs every signal it runs across, and will, at times, also find its own special Treasure locked away in that star, above and beyond the ones you can purchase from the Hunter.
That’s the technical explanation: the practical one is where you flip your DS to scan and set out by car/bike/bus and hear it ping and clink like a slot machine jackpot as it wildly grabs signals out of the thin air around you, the Wish Finder’s telescope swinging madly from new star to new star, unlocked treasure chests suddenly flinging open for a split second before moving on to the next.
And so but then: you’ve returned home and now have your pile of scalped booty (typical cross-town runs for me have grabbed on the order of 250+ signals/stars). At this point you’ve got two goals: the first is the mini-Pinocchio-esque task of transforming your Wish Finder into a Real Boy/Girl via the costume treasures — picture Animal Crossing‘s fashion array multiplied by a hundred, with various shirts/pants/Honey Bear heads/samurai armor kits all mix and matchable.
Your second is to decorate your garden with the rest of the acquired treasure, which comes in a staggering array of real-world flora, statues, Moai heads, balloons, paper lanterns — again, think Animal Crossing without the matched furniture sets and you’re on the right order.
And so but then: as it turns out, every collectible object you place is in fact a note of a distinct musical instrument, and your garden? It’s a miniature 32-note music tracker, and by laying out your goods (or by collecting pre-mades from the stars), you can arrange your own defacto songs, which the residents of the garden’s Firefly Lantern can interpret and play (if this is starting to sound like the stream-of-consciousness bedtime stories told in City of Lost Children, you’re right).
And so but then: the final piece of Treasure World‘s puzzle? The Club Treasure World website, where all of your possessions, Songscape garden layout and compositions are not only synced, but re-imaged in Flash to match your on-DS world. On top of that, your songs are made available for anyone to listen to via a mini-WinAmp music player.
And so but then also: Aspyr have also set up both on-site treasures that can only be unlocked via rare in-game keys, which are spread out for unlocking over the course of this year, and special Achievement-like challenges that currently can only be unlocked by laying out your garden in specific patterns with specific objects (that get harder the more rare the items needed), which will expand in due time to more outright location-based challenges (think something like needing to visit Trafalgar Square to find a specific word on a specific plaque).
The greatest strike you can hold against Treasure World is that once you’ve come back home, dusted off your collected stars and spent the last of that dust in trade with the Sweep, there’s not much reason — outside obsessively arranging and composing your Songscape — to even keep the game powered on, but that, as I said, is quite entirely the point.
With the Wi-Fi signals you’ve previously found cataloged away and kept from offering any further treasure, the game is constantly and aggressively trying to push you back into the real world, to abandon your usual routine routes and further explore — and to work socially to identify which places around you offer the best bits of kit (ie. “the Starbucks on Main Street gives you a wicked space helmet”) — and making a game out of life itself is precisely, in the end, just what makes it such a rare and valuable gem.
Club Treasure World [Aspyr, feel free to add me there!]
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