Early DS
Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:15:00 GMT
Well, I said I’d blog about Nintendo DS games, and it didn’t really happen except for my little email to Capcom about the “fabulous” voice acting in their latest game (I actually did send that, incidentally… it wasn’t one of those “open letters” which people put on a blog and then expect the company to run across by accident.) And you know, because I didn’t blog about DS games, people complained. So this entry should keep those people happy, or at least sedated.
Since I seem to have a little time to burn, and I don’t have a large amount of text for any of these, I’m just going to run off the first few games I bought and played on the Nintendo DS, and drop some commentary on those. You know, so that these games don’t feel left out if I initially start going on about Kirby.
Wario Ware: Touched! was really the first game I bought, the one which came bundled with the DS. The DS was actually out for a little while before I bothered to pick one up… I think that was mostly because Super Mario 64 DS and the Metroid demo were bundled with all the earlier models I found, and the cost of the unit by itself wasn’t appealing for the first few months. Mario 64 DS, of course, sucked. Its controls made it nothing like the work of art which was the original, and we shall never speak of it again. Metroid is probably going to be good, but you know, showing people a demo and then saying that they can’t buy the game is effectively giving gamers blue balls.
Touched!, though, short as it was, was quite good. It delighted, it infuriated. It was responsible for some of the damage to my DS’s screen, which I still need to get repaired. These days (I mean, it’s almost a year since the game came out, but still) it doesn’t measure up to the current selection of games, but I would still pick it up in a second hand bin if I didn’t have it already.
Polarium was the second, and still the cheapest, game I bought. The whole game revolves around flipping tiles from black to white in order to clear rows while the level tries to flood off the top of the screen, so in some senses you can consider it to be a descendent of Tetris. It used the DS’s second screen as a kind of extension of the game board. As the stylus only works on the bottom screen, though, it functioned more like Tetris’s “next block” window than an extension of the game board.
Multiplayer was supposed to be quite good, but I never found someone interested in the same game because, well, people generally just don’t like puzzle games.
Meteos, similar to Tetris but even more similar to Tetris Attack, got a lot of hype as “the Lumines of the DS” as it was by the same developer, and was very similar in concept. The game was extremely addicting while it lasted, but it didn’t last long enough. Even playing one level over and over to mine for precious metals was enjoyable, particularly when the level starts becoming really easy and the Meteo count starts skyrocketing.
Multiplayer for Meteos was supposed to be awesome too, but again, puzzle game… no interest. The only way I’m getting opponents for this one is by buying a second DS and thrusting it in people’s faces. Anyone who owns their own would already have something better to do.