DS

Glory Days 2

September 24, 2007

DS / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Let’s clear one thing up: there is no Glory Days 1. While Glory Days was the project name, the title was released as Super Army War. With the sequel, I can’t blame Eidos for switching the name back to the original. Either way, gameplay is king, and whatever this game’s called, it has a simple charm that makes it worth playing.

In Glory Days 2, players take control of an aircraft in a side-scrolling battle for territory. The small tasks vary from rescuing civilians to bombing enemy units, but the inevitable goal is to push back the opposing forces, taking control of all the territory. There’s also a tactical element to the game, with deployment of troops put under the user’s control.

The gameplay seems fresh in today’s gaming climate, but it bears a striking resemblance to 8-bit favorite Choplifter. The game’s feel is a bit different, as it feels clean and bloodless but still has a tone of military reverence. Between each level in the campaign, the game shows and narrates a fictional letter from a soldier to home. This is a strange thing to include, but it manages to give the otherwise story-deprived title some emotion.

The game includes touch-screen controls, but they’re mostly clunky, so most will end up reverting to the d-pad-and-buttons option for a while. The graphics, while not magnificent, get the job done well, and the orchestral score makes the experience feel grand.

The campaign mode, while well-done, ends much more quickly than it should. There are options for regular play, but it doesn’t make up for this shortcoming. A nice addition, though, is the game’s multiplayer. With a relatively rare title like this, download play would have been nice, but the multi-card play is deep enough to warrant convincing a friend to pick this up too.

All in all, Glory Days 2 is great fun. It’s a bit short, but if it finds enough of a following, the sequel could get the budget to make the experience a bit more fleshed out.

Mega Man Star Force: Pegasus

September 17, 2007

DS / Reviews / by Graham Russell Make a comment! / Tweet it!

When Mega Man Battle Network debuted on the GBA in 2001, it was greeted warmly; after all, it was a deep, unique experience that was friendly to all ages. Sadly, six years later, Capcom continues to release the same game with slight variations.

So how does the gameplay hold up? In a word, badly.

The main battle element of the game has seen the biggest change: the move to a 3-D perspective. All the characters are now simple cel-shaded polygons instead of detailed sprites, and the action is viewed from behind the protagonist. This doesn’t change the gameplay, though, and it sadly seems to make it harder to know what’s going on. Sometimes the enemies will be blocked from view because Mega Man’s back is in the way, and it’s also harder to judge how close the enemies’ shots are to hitting.

The series is still suffering from a lack of polish. The text screens still use the spaced-out letters, leaving room for only three or four words at a time, and the unnecessary talking gets obnoxious because it can’t be skipped.

The game’s three versions (Pegasus, Leo and Dragon) have very little to differentiate them other than a few branded elements. Capcom is still trying to cash in on the Pokemon-like different version trend, even though most other developers seem to have come to their senses.

The title isn’t completely without some redeeming qualities. The ability to connect with friends and have meaningful results is nice, and fits in with the idea of multiple versions. Also, the gameplay itself isn’t that bad, so for those that managed to avoid all the previous titles, there’s still some enjoyment to be had here.

It seems that Capcom itself is even realizing how stale the experience is, since it renamed the series from Battle Network to Star Force. However, it would have been a much better idea to change the actual gameplay too. The real problems of the game, namely the clunky system and lack of variety, are still here. I’d say that I hope these problems are fixed in the next sequel, but there doesn’t need to be a follow-up to this one.

Brain Age 2: More Training In Minutes A Day

August 31, 2007

DS / Reviews / by Chris Rasco Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Brain training games are very popular right now and are now available on most platforms. To capitalize on that momentum, Nintendo is back with another installment of the first brain-training game that started it all, Brain Age 2.

Brain Age 2 will seem very familiar to people who own its predecessor as the presentation is virtually indistinguishable from the first Brain Age. In fact, the only thing that sets Brain Age 2 apart is the different lineup of brain training exercises that are included. Not that this is a bad thing, but it would have been nice to see a little evolution in the presentation of the game.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the Brain Age series, I’ll give some background. Professor Ryuta Kawashima, a prominent Japanese neuroscientist, has evaluated the impact of certain exercise in the fields of reading and math on one’s brain. His research inspired a game that made it easy to stimulate your brain through simple math problems or quick problem solving exercises. That game was Brain Age and the premise of the game is that you train your brain through various exercises on a daily basis as if it were a muscle. Each day you also complete a series of short tests that determine your A

Nervous Brickdown

August 17, 2007

DS / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Nervous Brickdown borrows a lot from arcade classics like Arkanoid and Breakout. Sadly, it doesn’t copy the one thing it really needs: consistency. Nervous Brickdown is short, and the levels go by quickly. This is normal for an Arkanoid clone. What isn’t normal is that after a few levels of Nervous Brickdown the game shifts gameplay concepts. In the initial stages, for example, you’re playing the classics: moving a paddle along the bottom of the screen to destroy the blocks at the top. Then some new block types like bumpers and oddly shaped transparent, translucent, and finally solid blocks are introduced. Things are going well, and you’re adjusting to these new elements when suddenly you’re fighting a boss. Once the boss goes down it’s time to change everything up and turn the game world into paper where you have to draw your own paddle.

Things get very confusing very quickly, and the only real problem presented is that instead of giving us five separate game modes Arkedo Studio has piled each and every one of their ideas into Brickdown‘s Arcade mode. I would have much rather seen a Classic Mode, a Paper Mode, a Haunted House Mode, a Boss Rush Mode, and so on. Exacerbating the sour taste left in one’s mouth from the lack of modes is the game’s length. If each level set were its own mode then the game wouldn’t only take an hour and a half to work through. Games shouldn’t be that short – especially on the first attempt.

The graphics are pleasant, and the music is great. The haunted house levels sound creepy and the classic levels sound like the wasted days of my youth spent in the arcades of yesteryear. Unfortunately, the game just doesn’t stand up to today’s standards. Arkanoid and Breakout are fun for roughly ten minutes. That’s why they were arcade games. You could get all the requisite fun for an evening out of them with one quarter.

Multiplayer is novel, and you only need one DS chip, but it suffers from the same shortcomings as single player. It’s just not engrossing. To Arkedo Studio’s credit, though, the multiplayer is cooperative, which is a rare and welcome sight. Unfortunately, the multiplayer is ad hoc only – Nintendo’s WiFi service isn’t supported. How do two people cooperate at Nervous Brickdown? Well, the paddle changes colors. If the paddle is blue then you can make contact with the ball while your teammate can’t; if the paddle is yellow then your friend is the only one who can hit the ball. Interesting idea, but it won’t hold you for long – especially since both players can move the paddle at all times making the multiplayer more trouble than it’s worth.

Nervous Brickdown is a good update to the standard hit-the-ball-and-destroy-the-blocks game, but it’s just not enough to keep gamers going. If you have an undying urge to smash bricks then this game is as good as any, but for everybody else there’s really nothing special here.

Picross DS

August 13, 2007

DS / Reviews / by Justin Last Make a comment! / Tweet it!

Puzzle games are right at home on Nintendo’s Dual Screen portable; it already offers Polarium, Puzzle Quest, and two versions of Meteos. But that didn’t stop me from firing up my GameCube with attached Game Boy Player and playing a few rounds of Mario’s Picross, one of the best puzzlers out there. Now you can essentially play it anywhere with the release of Picross DS. The basics are still there, there are plenty of puzzles, and if ever a game begged to use the touch screen it’s this one.

For those of you that don’t know, here’s a quick rundown of how Picross works. You’re presented with a grid of boxes, from 5×5 to 20×25. Each row and column has a string of numbers attached to it detailing how the squares can be filled in to create a picture. Each number represents a chain of filled boxes, separated by at least one space. You must use logic to determine where the boxes go in the grid. The concept is amazingly simple, but that doesn’t mean that the puzzles don’t get difficult. It’s not uncommon to spend 30 minutes or more on a complicated puzzle. Thankfully, you can save at any point and come back to your puzzle at a later time from exactly where you left off.

Picross DS is a simple game with a clean design. It features simple themed levels, from letters of the alphabet to safari animals to flowers to bugs. But the lack of brilliant graphics doesn’t harm the game. Once the concept has clicked it could have been in black-and-white and still be amazingly entertaining, as originally proved by Mario’s Picross. The music, however, is repetitive and generally forgettable. I honestly find that the game is more enjoyable with it off.

Picross DS has two control schemes, stylus and d-pad. The stylus controls are well-suited to the DS’s touchscreen. Hold down the B button and you’ll cross squares out – denoting that they do not need to be filled in, and hold down the X button and you’ll fill squares in. The A and Y buttons zoom in and out — essential for large puzzles. The stylus controls are elegant in their simplicity and they get the job done wonderfully. If you’d rather use the directional pad, though, you have the option. Instead of holding a button and tapping the screen, you’ll move the cursor and press the same buttons to solve the puzzles. The d-pad scheme works as advertised, but the zooming ability of the touch controls is very nice and worth using.

My favorite feature of Picross DS is the WiFi, and Nintendo has also gone the extra mile and is providing us with more Picross puzzles available for download. There is no better way to give a puzzle game longevity than to toss me new levels for free (something other puzzle games should be doing, but often don’t). Picross DS also includes a tracked mode called Daily Picross that is full of training-type games. If your Picross skills aren’t quite up to par and you’re having trouble with Free Play Mode then Daily Picross will help you hone your box-coloring logic skills. And anybody that has played Picross has – at some point- broken out the graph paper and tried to make their own. Now you don’t need graph paper, a copy machine, and stamps to share your personal Picross creations with your friends. Picross DS’s puzzle creation mode is adequate (and the automatic generation of number on the columns and rows is wonderful), and what really pushes it into “great mode” territory is the fact that puzzles can be shared via the Nintendo WiFi connection.

Picross DS is a joy to play and a perfect fit for Nintendo’s touch-centric handheld. If you’ve found yourself addicted to crossword puzzles, Kakuro, or Sudoku, then you owe it to yourself to try Picross DS – especially since it’s a budget title. I don’t remember the last time I’ve played a $20 DS game for this long.

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