Chulip Preview

Natsume had an interesting game to show at this year's E3 called Chulip. Derived from the Japanese word “Chu,” the sound effect of kissing, and lip, like the ones on your face. Chulip begins with a kid and his father moving to a new town. They aren’t very well off in terms of money, so they are outcasts in this new town. One night the boy dreams of kissing a girl under a local tree, and later that day he sees that girl in town. Upon asking her out she immediately turns him down, telling him he isn’t popular enough.

Everyone in this town is unhappy. In fact some look very angry, and your job is to go around kissing everyone to cheer them up. This will increase your reputation, which will lead to making your dream come true. So the point of the game is to kiss all the unhappy people in town so that you can eventually kiss the girl you really like.

A lot of your targets in the beginning are easy. All you have to do is wait for the steam shooting from their head to turn to music notes and you kiss them. If you kiss them at the wrong time they won’t like it and they’ll hit you. Later on people are harder and harder to kiss, and you’ll have to figure out the best ways to go about doing it.

Chulip is a very obscure title, and Natsume realizes that only the truly hardcore gamers that know about it will buy it. So to help open it up to a wider audience, they are planning on releasing in a $9.99-$19.99 price range. Chulip is a lot of fun, the graphics are cute and cartoony, and there is a lot of humor interlaced throughout the game. Keep your eye out for this one third quarter of this year.

For All E3 2004 Previews