Treasure World [DS]

If you're musically inclined Treasure World has a pretty decent song constructor that uses all of the items you score in your hunt. Each object has an instrument or sound effect attached to it, and your plot of land is laid out as "sheet music." The location of your object is played as a note in your song, and while your song can only be a few dozen beats long, it allows for a good amount of musical freedom. What's more, the game's online focus opens up the Treasure World community. After you've set up your area you can hit the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and upload your profile to the Club Treasure World website. Your entire DS profile will be copied over, and the website will mirror every aspect of your progress on the handheld. Your songs created on the DS can be seen and played in a web browser. Your avatar's appearance is displayed along with your stardust score and the amount of specific awards you've earned along the way. It's a well designed website that encourages frequent visits: treasures you earn will open up goodies on the site, with many treasures becoming available on specific days of the year.

Because the game's new and relatively unknown, the online community is pretty small. But there's promise for growth as the website incorporates Facebook-like "friending" other users and the ability to trade items between pals. The website will also soon open up a hotspot locator in a Google Maps engine where players can note the general location of where they found a particularly awesome item.

Treasure World is a tough beast to review because there's not much to the actual "game" portion. In titles like Animal Crossing and Pokemon collection is a big part of the experience, but it's not the only part – in Animal Crossing you build up your collection but then hop off to fish, catch bugs, chat with town folks, and in Pokemon your collection is used as your fighting partners. But Treasure World's focus is entirely on the collection aspect, and there's not much within the game to do beyond simply trying to acquire more stuff. Much of the fun of Treasure World comes from experiences outside of the Nintendo DS cartridge. If you find yourself collecting things simply because it gives you pleasure, then man, is this the game for you.

Treasure World is well designed with really sharp graphics and well established atmosphere. It's hard to ignore the clunkiness of the game's user interface, though. Initially it's a difficult menu system to navigate and understand because the designers use an icon-based system with images that aren't immediately recognizable. Once you figure out which button does what it's not hard to maneuver through the menus, but a game aimed at kids shouldn't overwhelm with so much clutter.

Closing Comments
The core concept behind Treasure World is incredibly innovative. The idea of using Wi-Fi signals to build up a collection is just as good an encouragement to get out and walk as Nintendo's Personal Trainer Walking, but instead of building up steps in a pedometer, you're scooping up invisible signals floating around in the air. I had a whole lot of fun wandering my neighborhood seeing what cool stuff I could collect, but I honestly wish there was more to the DS experience than just setting it to "scope" and picking up Wi-Fi signals. The music creation tool is pretty decent and the online community is surprisingly rich. But this game just begs for more in-game activities.

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