Call it a pleasant surprise, but a few good games later, I have. There are diamonds in this rough. And other positively-vibed clichés. Some are better than others, some are better than expected, some are worse. All that I’ve had a decent go at are here. And you may consider discovering them yourself.
Brain Age and Brain Age 2
“Red! Blu-ack! Yel-blue! Gaaah!”
Brain Age was my (and I imagine many people’s) first experience with a DS. “Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!” Suffice to say I don’t opt to play video games for only minutes a day – nor am I an ardent math geek. Math is for school (and when necessary, real life), not for video games. There are other “games” to be had in the Brain Ages, but many of them involve math or memorization or logic or concentration – all of which I’ve found to be requirements of other far more entertaining games. The Brain Age games do have some slight appeal, however. Brain Age’s daily memory drawing assignments (i.e. “Draw a rhinoceros”) can be quite amusing, at least if two people have saved games on the same game card – Brain Age lets you see and compare your often awful drawings. Brain Age 2 also appealed to my musical sense – the piano game (reading notes off a score and playing them on the touch screen’s piano) is surprisingly fun – as is the hidden Virus Buster minigame, which resembles Dr. Mario. Sudoku in both games is also good for a moment’s entertainment – once you get over the learning curve and learn all the tricks involved. Still, both Brain Age games can be incredibly frustrating, and without your constant practicing, only succeed in making you feel old and stupid – don’t get me started on that Head Count game.
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| He makes it sound like fun. It isn't. Trust me. |
The Verdict: Idle fun, mild entertainment, decent price – but you can do far better.
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga
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| “Look at that Jawa explode!” |
This was something I bought on a whim, given how cheap it was at the time and how much I had liked Lego Indiana Jones. Yep, Lego. It looks like it was mined from the bottomless pit of kiddy crap titles, but judge not, for it was made by my second-favourite video game developer of all time, LucasArts. LucasArts has a knack for making games that reek of hilarity without being too weird or too stupid. It’s a delicate balance, but somehow they keep it. If you haven’t played their Monkey Island games, you’ve certainly been missing out – but that is another story that shall be told another time. Lego games have that same strange brilliance – the cuteness of seeing your silver screen heroes (and their dwellings, vehicles, and weapons) built out of Lego blocks, the amusement of seeing them wander off cliffs or get one too many hits with the laser gun – and explode into bitty bits. Aww. Lego Star Wars is no exception, and while the DS game can’t live up either to its fellow incarnations on PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii, nor other Lego games on non-portable platforms (i.e. the aforementioned Lego Indiana Jones), I still think it was worth the money.
Lego Star Wars for DS is an easy to pick up and hard to put down sort of game. The point is to travel through the storylines of two trilogies as various main characters (i.e. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and even R2-D2), picking up Lego studs (tiny round pieces of Lego, not hot Lego men ;->) and collecting various hidden items in order to unlock more levels and features of the game. Some of these items can’t be collected in the first run-through (since they require abilities the preselected characters in Story Mode don’t possess), but never fear, you can replay the level in Free Play with any set of characters you choose and get all you left behind. And when that gets boring (it takes a long while), there’s always the unlockable minigames to fiddle around with. Sure, dying in this game is virtually meaningless (you lose studs, but you can often pick them right up again – and there’s no way to die outright), some levels border on too easy, and there’s no two-player without two cards and two DSes (and part of the fun of the Lego games is two-player coop), but for the $20 I paid for it? Not a bad deal – not a bad deal at all.
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| The only sad thing is, Han Solo isn't as yummy as a piece of Lego. |
The Verdict: A bit flawed, and not comparable to its peers on larger consoles, but good cheap easy fun – with studs!
Final Fantasy IV
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| “Fly me to the moon… in a whale… is there some kind of weird symbolism going on here that I’m not privy to?” |
I had encountered this game before when it was Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo. I never played it, but my brother did, and I saw – and remembered – the vast majority of it. After Kingdom Hearts made me a Final Fantasy fan, this became the game that sold me on owning a DS. It is the story of Cecil Harvey, a dishonored knight, once Captain of the Red Wings under his corrupted king’s command. With the help of his friends, he must find his true self and save his home from an otherworldly threat.
This is a typical Final Fantasy RPG with an expansive, multifaceted storyline that I highly enjoy. Though the graphics seem a bit compromised on the DS, the voice acting and the 3D rendered characters and environments are a nice touch. The characters also have their own distinct personalities and abilities (my favourites are the sharp-tongued mage Rydia and the brash and aloof ninja prince Edge), and this is what sets Final Fantasy IV apart from that other DS Final Fantasy – Final Fantasy III. In FFIII, the characters might as well be interchangeable, and my brief stint with the game (before I got bored of it) made me feel that their quest might as well have been arbitrary – the “Go here, do this” missions that came without much (or any) explanation were hardly gratifying. But FFIV is the exact opposite – almost immediately the characters and the quests start to mean something, and the story becomes as relatable and entertaining as those of FFX, FFVIII, and that supposed god of all Final Fantasy games, FFVII. All this in a nice, sweet, portable format.
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| I remember this thing being a pain in the butt to kill. But nothing next to Caganazzo. |
The Verdict: A must for any JRPG fan – heck, any DS owner who likes fantasy stuff.
Mario Party DS
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| “Stop throwing pancakes at me, you fungus-brain!” |
Like I said, I’m not a Mario fan. I honestly don’t understand what people see in those games – but then again, I’m often foiled by the fretful combination of bottomless pits and gravity. This game, however, is (almost) devoid of pitfalls, and, well, barrels of fun (unless you get run over by one, that is, and lose all your coins). Mario Party is a fun marriage of board game and video game – run around on a game board, and try to be the one with the most stars come game’s end. Win the minigames at the end of each round, and collect coins to purchase said stars – and other items that can aid your progress and hinder others’.
This game is packed. Aside from the Story Mode (in which you traverse all five game boards and beat bosses minigame-style), you can play on any of the boards individually, or just play the minigames on their own (my favourite is Camera Shy – playing paparazzi in a hedgemaze). There’s also a separate Puzzle Mode packed with minigames of its own. But the best feature is the game’s wireless play feature, which lets up to four people with DSes play together with only one game card. If you have friends with DSes, this is like having a portable console game – something I have played not only with someone sitting in an adjacent room, but also in the interludes between movies on a triple feature day at the cheap theatre. Fun fun fun.
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| Ahh... the fireball cometh and taketh your coins. Crapeth. |
The Verdict: It’s a better game than Mario Party Wii, AND it’s portable. Definitely worth your pennies – especially if you have friends to play it with.
Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days
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| “Apparently that sea salt ice cream is non-fat. Either that, or those Nobodies have crazy good metabolisms.” |
This was the other reason I HAD to get a DS – I am a mad crazy Kingdom Hearts nutball. And if you ignore the nostalgic draw of the original Kingdom Hearts (a PS2 game), this is probably the best game in the series. Yeah, it’s another JRPG. You got me. And it’s a midquel, so if you haven’t played the other games in the series, you’d probably have no idea what was going on. But – even for story alone – it is AMAZING.
I won’t get into big gory story details (see Post #2 for that), but this is an action RPG – so lots of keyblade slashing, not just picking battle moves from menus – up to snuff with its PS2 predecessors. The graphics aren’t great outside of FMV cutscenes, but most of the game’s missions are equally fun and challenging. What I’d most like to try, however, is the game’s multiplayer mode, which lets you select from a range of characters from the game’s story (each with their own strengths and weaknesses) and compete against friends in missions for points – which allow you to earn/unlock some pretty awesome stuff. Problem is, this multiplayer mode requires one game card per character, and given that my DS-endowed friends haven’t yet been indoctrinated in the ways of Kingdom Hearts (and the friends that have don’t have DSes), I’ve yet to be able to experience this. But it looks like such fun… and I’d love to play as Axel or Riku or Demyx or Xion for a change… sigh.
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| Roxas and Axel: Back In Black. Oh yeah! |
The Verdict: A must for Kingdom Hearts fans. If you like Kingdom Hearts and you don’t have a DS – get one.
Scribblenauts
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| “There’s nothing I can’t solve with a Pegasus, a rope, and the Grim Reaper.” |
Getting this game was a gamble that paid off. I first read about it in a kids’ movie magazine – the kind you get for free at theatres. Naturally I thought it was more of that pony-princess-Tamagotchi-ripoff schlock that fills the majority of the DS bargain bins out there. It is anything but that. It is, in fact, the second-funniest video game I have ever played (the first is the Monkey Island series as a whole). It was designed to be puzzle-solving meets Mad Libs. It is. Basically, you have to overcome obstacles on any given level to get the goal – the Starite. Do that, and you beat the level. To aid you, you are able to use almost any object imaginable, from the obvious (ropes, ladders, ramps) to the bizarre (Tyrannosaurs, time machines, and God Himself – who is apparently fatally attracted to lava – long story). The more creative you are, the more points you get – and once again, those points unlock new levels and extra features. Some puzzles offer a physical challenge (the Starite is out of reach, and you have to devise a way to get to it), while others require some thought and deftness (help a cook make a meal or protect a child from flesh-eating zombies – and if you succeed, the Starite with appear). As a bonus challenge, once you beat a level for the first time, you can take it on again three times in a row – and attempt to get through without using the same object twice.
This game is even fun when things go horribly wrong – the Frankenstein monster you reanimated up and eats you, or the king you’re supposed to protect takes a jolly ride on his sheep off a cliff and into lava. The touch-screen controls aren’t particularly precise, and though this can lead to some fun mayhem (“Oops – I just threw a watermelon at Dracula!”), it can also lead to some pretty cheap failures and deaths. But have patience. Moments of brilliance can be rewards unto themselves (i.e. putting a crescent moon in the sky to de-wolf a werewolf) – and who hasn’t wanted to pit Cthulu against a kracken?
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| My ever-useful Pegasus. Things look surprisingly peaceful and unjuxtaposed. Strange. |
The Verdict: Imperfect, and sometimes frustrating, but a DS staple – at least if you have a brain and a sense of humour.
The World Ends With You
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| “Well, I’m reading people’s minds, polishing a statue, and fending off a frog that’s chewing on my rear with my trendy pins and clothing. Gotta love Japanese video games.” |
This was another title I had heard good things about, and was interested in primarily because it was developed by the same people who made Kingdom Hearts. Well, aside from the art style, it is nothing like Kingdom Hearts – but it has a charm and appeal all its own, and if you can get attuned to the standard-yet-this-time-unabashed JRPG wackiness, you’ll probably love it, oddness and all.
The story centers on a young man named Neku, who wakes up in Shibuya, Tokyo’s famous Scramble Crossing with no memories – never mind any idea how he got there. He soon realizes he’s become a player in a twisted game – lose, and he’ll be erased from existence. To survive, he’ll have to team up with other Players and surpass challenges unlike any he’s ever known – or face the onslaught of the mysterious Reapers and the game’s Composer…
The gameplay is the best use of the DS’s unique touch screen that I’ve yet encountered. Neku can equip pins which allow him to perform “psychs” – psychically-powered physical and magical attacks on “noise” – a whole zoo of supernatural creatures which pepper the psychic plane of Shibuya. Different psychs require different uses of the stylus – slash at enemies, draw circles around them, press on them, rapidly prod at them, and you’ll unleash different attacks. At the same time as you control Neku on the bottom screen with the stylus, you control his partner (Shiki, Joshua, or Beat) on the top screen with the Control Pad or the ABYX buttons. It’s very confusing at first, but once I got a better grasp on it (and set the top screen controls to AUTO), it was quite fun to fight noise after noise after noise. Couple this gameplay with a fantastic contemporary story as complex and meaningful as those of other Square Enix games (not to mention a groovy J-Pop soundtrack), and you have a winner.
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| Yeah. I was confused too. |
The Verdict: The best (and most DS-like) RPG on the DS. If you can find it, get it.
Chrono Trigger
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| “Cavegirls and Robots and Sword-Wielding Frogs Named Glenn – Oh My!” |
The Verdict: Bears repeating – it’s cheap and good. You don’t see that very often. Hint hint hint.
And that, as they say, is that.
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