NIGHTS - INTO DREAMS

(Please mention my name if you intend on using my artwork)!

The time is 1996. There is a console battle between Sega’s Saturn and Sony’s Playstation.. But soon Nintendo enters with their N64 and Super Mario 64!!! Sega takes on Mario 64...

Back when the Saturn had been out on the market for a while many people and game programmers were complaining about the lack of 3D finesse that the Saturn projected.. Sega responds by debuting Nights!

This game took the Saturn’s 3D to a new level of brilliance, with Sega keen to match this game to Super Mario 64!!!! Produced by the creators of Sonic games, Sonic Team has made a game visually exiting as Sonic the Hedgehog was in its day. Nights sure is a colourful and dynamic looking game!!

Sega also unveils a new analogue controller to use with the game (this controller could possibly have helped influenced the design for the Dreamcast controller).

Nights centers around a boy (Elliot Edwards) and a girl (Claris Sinclair). Both of them have low self esteem. Elliot is having trouble playing basketball against some older kids and Claris’s faith in entering an audition for ‘Twin Dreams’ play is dwindling!

That night Elliot and Claire (in their beds) are perhaps dreaming to themselves as failures. Nightopia, a world where dreams exist, an evil being called Wizeman is stealing dream energy from humans to use so that he can leave the subconscious and enter the human world and use his evil !!!

A being from Nightopia, a Nightopian escapes from the dream world and begs sleeping Elliot and Claris to save Nightopia!! Claris and Elliot for the first time feel courage growing within them.

They accept the quest. The Nightopian explains to them that they need to recover 4 types of dream energy (called Ideya). They are: White (Purity), Green (Wisdom), Yellow (hope), Blue (Intelligence).

Wizeman is stealing Claris and Elliot’s dream energy and is confusing them by placing them in strange dream worlds (These worlds are created from the depth of their minds). A 5th energy: Red (Bravery) cannot be stolen by Wizeman or his henchmen.

There is one who is not under Wizemans power called Nights, who appears as an aerial acrobat. Nights uses Claris and Elliots rare Bravery energy in aiding them defeat Wizeman. No one has any idea who or what Nights is! but Nights helps restore Ideya back to Elliot and Claris to help them defeat Wizeman as well as their own nightmares.....

The A-Life System Nightopians actually live in the game! How they feel towards you depends on what you do to them and affects them mating! If they are happy they sing, if you kill them the others will run from you and its possible to mix breed them with enemies. Sometimes you see them doing little jobs like sweeping the dream world with a broom!!!

Nights has some fantastic dreamy music, some of the tunes evoke things like happiness when you were a child. Its also strange but I think depending on the mood of the Nightopians, the music in the game mutate so it sounds remixed!!!

Nights is'nt without flaws, for example there are some dodgy camera angles and there is no training mode..

But what there is.....creates a fantastical game many dream about! I once read this in a magazine, Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Zelda, Mario and Donkey Kong) said that if there was one game he wished he’d made it would have been Nights! Nights is only available on the Saturn.

There was a demo disc Sega gave out called Christmas Nights. Nights has also appeared on Dreamcast in the pinball game in Sonic Adventure. Nights is also rumoured to be made into a small downloadable game for the Gameboy Advance ..............

Dreams are made of these...