QuickSpot (DS)
After playing the spot the difference mode in Disney’s A Christmas Carol, I began to wonder if I might have never given that niche genre a fair shake. Most of my experience with spot the difference puzzles was through things like Highlights magazine where they were made very easy for a younger audience, but I decided to pick up a game devoted to spot the difference puzzles to see if it might click with me. QuickSpot is clearly not going for a traditional approach to this style of puzzle though, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it certainly isn’t the game that’s going to give me the answer I was looking for.
QuickSpot’s selection of spot the difference puzzles are not focused on the difficulty of finding what is different between two very similar images. In QuickSpot’s main mode Rapid Play, the top and bottom screen of the DS will display a picture that is exactly the same save for one detail that has been changed. You need to circle this single specific difference as quickly as you can to get through each level’s ten main rounds, but despite locating the difference as quickly as you can being the main challenge of Rapid Play, rarely does the game even try to make this difficult. Pictures often have one strikingly obvious change that’s hard not to notice, and while there are a few rare ones that require a brief scan to puzzle out what’s been altered, the game clearly isn’t going for difficulty here so much as testing your ability to quickly circle the right spot on the screen. There isn’t even much of an effort to alter how these changes are implemented. If you see a character on screen you can be reasonably safe in assuming that the head or arms will be different between images, unless of course they’ve just slapped a huge object on the screen instead.
Rapid Play is clearly meant to be the game’s main mode, it featuring the most content and being where the game draws its name from. While most of your time in this mode involves just rapidly circling the easily found differences, there are gimmicks introduced that are meant to complicate the process, although very few do more than waste time. Some images are covered with leaves that you need to blow away with the DS microphone, others need to be revealed first by scratching away an obfuscating layer with your stylus, but the main takeaway from these added obstacles is they are quickly overcome and are more disruptions than interesting new variables. There are some that do actually add appreciated shifts to how you spot the differences though. One involves the player seeing a completed image like a robot or bicycle and then having to identify which item in a set of objects is not used to build that image. Another involves a long scrolling stage where the image automatically moves along and you need to make sure you spot the sometimes subtle changes before they move off-screen. Perhaps the hardest gimmick mode has everything on screen moving while the player has to find the one that moves differently, the eyes no longer able to rely on spotting the obvious difference and instead having to observe each moving part. These special spot the difference puzzles are added to the general pool but are also accessible from unique levels, but you will still mostly do the quick single difference puzzles and fairly simple gimmicks for the majority of Rapid Play with the rare interruption of the simpler gimmicks like the leaf blowing variation.
Depending on how quickly you circle the right differences, you can earn a medal in levels to unlock extras, but you’ll also be graded on your performance based on a set of criteria. Intuition, Stability, Judgment, Concentration, and Recognition are all charted out in a pentagon for what it calls your Brain Activity rating, and for the most part, being speedy is all you need to do to have these be fairly high. However, there is an oddity in that Concentration and Recognition seem to want the player to accurately circle the differences between images. QuickSpot is quite generous in reading the circle you make to indicate what you think is the difference, the player able to make them as small and sloppy as they like so long as it is still on top of the appropriate point in the picture. However, making your circle big can make the game think you were just trying to cheese finding the difference so it might ask you to make the circle again, even when you were close to encircling the right point. In a game about speed it is a bit odd to ask the player to consciously take the time to carefully surround the area of interest with their circle, and while this won’t slow you down too much on the whole if you care about the Brain Activity element, going for medals is definitely better served by not going that extra mile, especially when some of the gimmicks like needing to rub the screen to reveal the picture would take longer if you want to be able to even circle that right difference.
One good thing that can be said about the spot the difference puzzles is that they have an incredible mix of styles and quality. On the one hand you might have to look at what are clearly the scribbles of a child for the difference and then a beautiful work of professional art can come right after. Cartoony scenes, clay art, pictures inspired by anime and comic books, and even images from other game series owned by publisher Namco like Klonoa, Pac-Man, and Tower of Druaga can find their way into the mix. The use of color can vary wildly across the board as well. One might be a rainbow of colors and another monotone, there are some that are detailed with their shading and others flat with solid colors. While some images are practically empty, there are ones that are crowded with distracting details or groups of nearly identical characters and objects, and if QuickSpot had been hoping to provide a true challenge with its spot the difference puzzles, the selection here would bring both an incredible amount of variety to the gameplay and have some images that would definitely stand out as supremely tough if well utilized. Instead, clearly out of place objects are plopped into pictures, some not even matching the proper shading and coloring of the other items in the picture, all in the service of supporting the Rapid Play mode that seems so built for speed that it forgot to make doing things quickly actually rewarding. The game also waits quite a while to rollout some of its images in Rapid Play, meaning you’ll come to recognize a few familiar ones and effectively eliminate the need to look at the top screen as you can already spot the difference just based on your memory.
There are other modes to be found in QuickSpot though, and Focused Mode is the more typical type of spot the difference puzzle. The need to be speedy has been stripped away, you no longer need to do a bunch of different images in sequence, and there are now multiple differences between the two pictures rather than one glaringly obvious one you need to circle. The reliance on mostly classical music feels more appropriate in these slower paced puzzles, although the Rapid Play does add some pep to them to make them more appropriate for speedy play. The image types also get more time in this mode to explore how they can be different, but we still find that QuickSpot isn’t really trying to be all that difficult. The 140 images available in Focused Mode all have ten differences each, and for the most part, all of the differences save one or two still feel fairly easy to spot quickly. Obvious areas of interest are again being changed in not so subtle ways, but the fact each image usually has one that will take a bit to find does mean this mode doesn’t feel quite as repetitive and bland as the Rapid Play challenges. The gimmicks won’t show up here so it is just pure spot the difference play, but the fact they’ll do small things like slightly shorten a character’s sleeve or the ears on a rabbit rather than just plonking down huge out of place objects means that you will sometimes have to really consider both images to be able to succeed.
The remaining modes don’t really have the substance to them to make up for Rapid Play’s failings. Today’s Fortune is pretty much just a trimmed down Rapid Play you can only play once a day but with multiple differences to make spotting a change easier, your made up horoscope at the end tied to which ones you ended up circling. Multiplayer comes in two forms. Time Bomb has you pass the DS around every time someone completes a spot the difference puzzle until one player loses when time is up, and Scramble Mode is competitive Rapid Play where the slower players can get power ups to mess with the other player’s screens. The problems with Rapid Play aren’t really solved in these minor twists on its formula, but the competitive angle of the multiplayer modes does at least make the foregone success of the main game levels less of a problem since it’s now about being better than another human with the same advantages as you.
THE VERDICT: QuickSpot attempted to make spot the difference puzzles more exciting by adding a time crunch, but the changes to the formula needed to allow for speedy play end up hurting the enjoyment. The differences are almost all too obvious in the main Rapid Play mode and the gimmicks meant to slow you down or force more careful consideration are either annoying or underutilized, leaving you with puzzles that are mostly too simple to solve and thus not satisfying to complete. The Focused Mode allows for more relaxed and challenging play but still falls into some of the same traps as Rapid Play, so while there are plenty of unique images from a wide variety of sources involved in the spot the difference puzzles, QuickSpot fails to make the best use out of them because it is afraid to actually make spotting the difference hard.
And so, I give QuickSpot for the DS…
A BAD rating. I feel like QuickSpot is the kind of game many people would default to saying “It’s not for me, but people who like spot the difference puzzles might enjoy it”. The images are definitely interesting and some of the gimmicks are nice variations on the spot the difference formula… but while I’m not a long time fan of the genre, I’m comparing this game to the side mode in Disney’s A Christmas Carol and finding that QuickSpot comes up short. A game that relegated its spot the difference puzzles to an advent calendar that is secondary to the main game has more challenging and interesting images to work with than a game based entirely around them, and that’s because Disney’s A Christmas Carol knew to mix in easily found changes with difficult and subtle ones. Details in images are used both to give you more to scour and serve as areas that can be altered without being so upfront you can’t miss them. QuickSpot wants things to move too quickly so it couldn’t construct such spot the difference puzzles, choosing to slap down obvious changes that don’t ask much from the player besides being able to circle them properly if they want the meaningless Brain Activity rating to pat them on the back. Even Focused Mode wasn’t willing to put up much of a fight, relying on many of the same tricks as Rapid Play but at least taking the time to throw in the occasional subtle alteration.
The gimmicks like identifying an image’s separated parts or trying to keep up with moving pictures feel like the right way to spice up the simplicity of spot the difference puzzles, but it seems Namco bet on the wrong horse when it came to the right gimmick to make the central focus. Speedy identification of differences might not be a bad concept, but the execution here is lacking because you’re only asked to point out the most obvious out of place objects rather than really testing your ability to differentiate between two similar pictures. I won’t dismiss either regular or speed-focused spot the difference puzzles because of this game’s problems with designing them. They can both seemingly work with the right degree of effort behind them, but QuickSpot clearly didn’t spend enough time thinking about how to execute its concepts effectively.