E3 06: Brooktown High: Senior Year First Look

Though the genre has never really caught on outside of its native Japan before, Backbone Entertainment is bringing the emotional drama of the dating simulation to the West with Brooktown High: Senior Year for the Sony PSP. You are put in the role of either a male or female senior of your own design in the eponymous Brooktown High, where you'll vie for the attention of the opposite gender as you search for your perfect soul mate to share your affection with eternally…or, at least until college.

There are plenty of insular Breakfast Club-style social cliques that you'll have to interact with, including jocks, nerds, preppies, and rebels, and the game promises 24 unique characters, each of which will come with his or her own unique quirks and characteristics. As you play suitor or suitor-ette, you'll go out on dates with potential mates in such familiar suburban settings as the mall, the movies, and the beach. The dates themselves will include a variety of minigames that will task you with shopping, telling jokes to impress your date, and more.

We were treated to a brief demonstration of Brooktown High: Senior Year at Konami's pre-E3 event today, during which the game was lightheartedly referred to as a first-person dater. The bulk of our demo looked a lot like the screenshots that were released for the game today, with the main character (who will presumably be fully customizable, and hopefully with a choice of gender) wandering around the titular high school from a third-person perspective. When he engaged in text-based conversations with members of the opposite sex, though, the camera switched to the first-person, which afforded us a great view of the female targets in question and of their varying physical responses to whatever our hero was saying to them.

Coming from Backbone Entertainment, the developer of Death Jr., Brooktown High: Senior Year will feature stylized visuals and an off-kilter sense of humor, and we're eager to see how the Western take on the predominantly Japanese dating sim genre will play out. School, and love, will be in session spring 2007.