Any DS recomendations?

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Having just finished Dawn of Sorrow and currently playing New Super Mario Bros., I'm looking to try out more games for the system. Anyone here that can share a few recomendations? I have no genre bias and can basically pick up any game.

[Zoma]

Elite Beat Agents and New Super Mario Bros are fun.

 

Mario Kart if you could find three other people with the same game.

 

Trauma Centre, a game that tries to be different from others.

 

Metroid for FPS.

 

Brain Age if you want to exercise your brain.

 

or Super Robot Wars Original generation series....I know its a GBA game, and I'm shamelessly promoting the game.

Edited January 27, 2007 by Zoma

[Musopticon?]

Kingdom Hearts and that new Castleroid game.

[Llyranor]

What games do you have?

 

NSMB was enjoyable, but I didn't find it as awesome as the reviews make it out to be. Super Mario World was so much more awesome back in the day.

 

Advance Wars Dual Strike is pretty nice for casual TB tactics. Self-explanatory.

 

Dragon Quest Rocket Slime is bloody excellent. It's very cutesy, which may be a deterrent, but the gameplay is s(ub)lime. Part of the game can be Zelda-lite in its action-adventure exploration mode. The gist of the game, though, is awesome tank battles. Essentially, throughout exploration, you pick up ammo which you use to arm your tank. You do go about picking up ammo during tank battles and throwing them into cannons. The charm is that you can go completely nuts. You can infiltrate the enemy tank and then throw them into their own cannon and blast them off, you can actually jump into you own cannon and fly off to try to infiltrate the enemy tank, you can throw some of your teammates (or again, yourself) in a last-ditch effort to block off incoming artillery. Downsides is that it's easy and arguably short (10 hrs?).

 

Castlevania Portrait of Ruin is nice, but it doesn't completely renew the Metroidvania formula. If you didn't like DoS too much, I don't think PoR will chance your mind.

 

Megaman ZX is awesome if you like Megaman. Self-explanatory.

 

Mario Kart is great if you like the series. Self-explanatory. Multiplayer is particularly nice.

 

Phoenix Wright is an excellent (albeit linear) adventure game. The writing ranges from solid to great. It's very dialogue-heavy, which I find a good thing. You essentially play a defense attorney. The game is centered around 5 cases. Each case has an investigation phase where you go about looking around the crime scenes and pick up evidence. Then, there's the court phase where you go about cross-examining witnesses and presenting evidence (again, very linear, so things have to be in the right order). If you don't like anime, this may turn you off. If you expect a simulation of the law system, you will want to murder me for this recommendation. The sequel just came out recently. I'll pick it up this week.

 

Hotel Dusk just got released over here. It'll be released in Europe in the coming months. I'll probably get it later this week and give impressions if you want. But general impressions seem to be overwhelming positive so far. The story/writing/characters are apparently the highlight of the game. It's a point-and-click adventure game. I'll let the intro make all the convincing. If you don't want this, you have no soul.

 

Now, for stylus-based games, you should probably get screen protectors.

 

Kirby Canvas Curse (I think it's Power Paintbrush over there in Loserland) is awesome and the first game that convinced me over touchscreen controls. You basically control a round ball (cutesy, may turn you off). With the stylus, you draw rainbows and lead the ball (Kirby) around, outmaneuvering obstacles and enemies. You can click on Kirby to activate some powers which you can obtain, or you can click on enemies to stun them (though, of course, you also have to maneuver Kirby around at the same time, so it's not as easy as it sounds). It's essentially a platformer, which a genuinely innovative control scheme. This is my favorite platformer game. Tons of lasting value with lots of things to unlock.

 

Meteos is perhaps Tetris on crack. Puzzle game with a relatively simple scheme of putting blocks of the same color together to make them fly off the screen. With the stylus, you can slide blocks up and down. That's it. The draw of the game is how bloody frantic it can get. The stylus controls allow this to all happen at such a fast pace that wouldn't be much possible with the conventional dpad.

 

Trauma Center is for all you surgeon-wannabes. It's not a surgery-simulation, as they're really cleverly-disguised puzzles oftentimes. This game is HARD. Some of the surgeries took me over 20 tries. You will either love it or hate it for that. I for one quite enjoyed the difficulty. The best part was really seeing your skills with the stylus improve as you progressed through the game. Each surgery can take from 2 to 10 min, so nice game for quick bursts.

Edited January 27, 2007 by Llyranor

[Pope]

it seems Yoshi's Island 2 is quite the shizzle

[karka]

ffIII

[Deraldin]

Elite Beat Agents

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I'd like to second this game. Lots of fun.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Thanks for the recomendations, everyone.

 

What games do you have?

 

For the Nintendo DS I only those two I mentioned: Dawn of Sorrow and New Super Mario Bros. For reference, I also have some Gameboy Advance titles as well - Metroid Fusion, Zelda: The Minish Cap, and (unsurprisingly) the Castlevania Double Pack with Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow.

 

Elite Beat Agents seems to be both a weird game and a blast, which is a nice combo when it's pulled off well. The only thing that's keeping me at bay at this moment is the inclusion of Ashlee Simpson, Cher and Avril Lavigne songs. Ritual disembowelment seems more attractive to me. But if the game's good...

 

I've alreadey preordered Portrait of Ruin. With some exceptions, Castlevania is another of those series I've been following ever since its inception and can't get tired of. I enjoyed Dawn of Sorrow enough, mind you; it's just that IGA's formula isn't taking the series anywhere but he's keeping to it since (reportedly) fans enjoy it. I'm just tired of emo pretty boys that look like third rate Alucard copies and seeing the Belmonts placed into a secondary role. The extra modes in recent 'Vanias aren't that inspired either, with Julius/Yoko/Alucard/Maxim being generally the same as Richter back in SotN - just there for the fans who don't seem to mind playing in a gameworld that was clearly not developed for these unlockable characters which are treated like supporting characters when their roles are possibly on par with those of Nathan, Juste or Soma.

 

Advance Wars seems nice. How's it different from its predecessors? Worth it for someone who played the original on the Gameboy Advance?

 

I've been told Metroid Prime: Hunters is pretty repetitive and only worth it for those who have the ability to play online. Is this true?

 

Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright look awesome. Is Phoenix Wright similar to the adventure portions of Snatcher? Ie, hunt the pixel, ask the question and find the clue to watch the well animated dialogue sequences?

 

Keep me informed about Hotel Dusk if you can, Llyr. Appreciate it.

 

All others seem nice as well, will look into them. Speaking of which, how's Age of Empires: The Age of Kings?

[Llyranor]

Despite how cool EBA sounds, I'm staying away for those reasons too.

 

I liked the dual-character system in PoR. Being able to have two characters at once was a nice touch. A full-fledged coop would have been godly, but oh well. The extra mode is completely different than the main game, with stylus controls. I haven't played much of that to comment further, though.

 

AWDS is probably just more of the same. It depends how much you enjoyed the GBA incarnations. I don't have the GBA ones, though, and only played very little of them.

 

AoE apparently is good, but also buggy. I'm not sure the extent and severity of those bugs, though. People seem to think AW is the better game, though.

 

Haven't played Snatcher, so I wouldn't be able to compare. You click on things and then you read text, yes, but I can't say there's really 'pixel' hunting. Given the linearity, you have to find particular clues before you can proceed on to certain parts of the story. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as you don't spend hours being lost and not knowing how to proceed while you try clicking over everything.

[Deraldin]

Elite Beat Agents seems to be both a weird game and a blast, which is a nice combo when it's pulled off well. The only thing that's keeping me at bay at this moment is the inclusion of Ashlee Simpson, Cher and Avril Lavigne songs. Ritual disembowelment seems more attractive to me. But if the game's good...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Which part of those songs do you hate? The songs themselves or the singers? There isn't a single song in the game that is actually performed by the original artist. And the Cher song is a bonus stage, but that only means that you likely won't have to play it on easiest difficulty and depending on how good you are, possibly the second easiest difficulty.

 

If it's any consolation, the Ashlee Simpson, Cher and Avril Lavigne songs are all rather easy to the point that you'll very likely be able to beat them on your first time through. "

 

The only songs that I didn't like were Jamiroquai - "Canned Heat" and David Bowie - "Let's Dance", mainly because they pissed me off so much while playing them. The beat markers didn't match up with the song. :angry:

[Diogo Ribeiro]

I dislike both the songs and the singers.

 

Though if the game is good enough I may overlook that. Especially since I don't use my DS on the go, and can safely limit those awful tunes to the four walls of my living room.

[Llyranor]

Or, you could import Ouendan instead, if you're more tolerant of Japanese pop that you've probably never heard before and therefore less likely to come in already hateful and enraged.

[metadigital]

It'd be better than Portughanistani pop, too. "

[Llyranor]

In any case, this should give you some idea of how Phoenix Wright plays

[Diogo Ribeiro]

It'd be better than Portughanistani pop, too. "

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I don't know about that. It would depend on just what kind of pop music you'd take as an example. There are scores of god awful pop acts in Portugal which are even several cuts below what pollutes most American airwaves (read: Pussycat Dolls, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani), but there are also some genuinely great ones which only lose out in popularity thanks to erratic media promotion and the often general belief that we can't compete with American pop music. It's not uncommon to have Portuguese acts make great one or two albums then fading into obscurity or spintering off into other bands.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

That prosecutor is kind of lame... He hasn't even heard of the Nintendo DS yet...

 

LOL!

 

I'm sold

[metadigital]

It'd be better than Portughanistani pop, too. "

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I don't know about that. It would depend on just what kind of pop music you'd take as an example. There are scores of god awful pop acts in Portugal which are even several cuts below what pollutes most American airwaves (read: Pussycat Dolls, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani), but there are also some genuinely great ones which only lose out in popularity thanks to erratic media promotion and the often general belief that we can't compete with American pop music. It's not uncommon to have Portuguese acts make great one or two albums then fading into obscurity or spintering off into other bands.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Then they would fail at being popular music, by definition, wouldn't they?

[Pidesco]

I don't know about that. It would depend on just what kind of pop music you'd take as an example. There are scores of god awful pop acts in Portugal which are even several cuts below what pollutes most American airwaves (read: Pussycat Dolls, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani), but there are also some genuinely great ones which only lose out in popularity thanks to erratic media promotion and the often general belief that we can't compete with American pop music. It's not uncommon to have Portuguese acts make great one or two albums then fading into obscurity or spintering off into other bands.

 

You're thinking of Ornatos Violeta aren't you?

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Yes. I'm also thinking of Mler Ife Dada, which IIRC had two albums released before ending (though they also released a couple of EPs).

 

Somewhat related, I can't stop wondering how a M

[Oerwinde]

I have a recommendation: Don't touch Children of Mana. Dear god that was an awful game. Its a shame that "This game is awful" is not a valid excuse to return a game so I ended up wasting 35 bucks.

Edited January 28, 2007 by Oerwinde

[Llyranor]

Haha, I enjoyed Children of Mana quite a bit, if only for the coop. As a singleplayer game, yeah, stay away. If you like coop and are willing to tolerate a dungeon crawler with fairly simplistic mechanics, then it might be worth a try. It has nothing - NOTHING - on Secret of Mana.

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Hey, how's Animal Crossing: Wild World? I know Josh was playing it some time ago... I heard some of it takes advantage of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection though I don't plan on using it.

[Oerwinde]

Haha, I enjoyed Children of Mana quite a bit, if only for the coop. As a singleplayer game, yeah, stay away. If you like coop and are willing to tolerate a dungeon crawler with fairly simplistic mechanics, then it might be worth a try. It has nothing - NOTHING - on Secret of Mana.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The problem with the multiplayer is it requires multiple people to have a copy of the game. And I wouldn't wish this game on anyone else. I emailed square for my money back and they told me to bitch to nintendo. Nintendo told me tough ****, should have rented it first.

 

My problem was that it was a highly rated game. I went to IGN, who gave it an 8, while the reader reviews raved about how great it was. Multiple people gave it 10/10. I should have paid more attention to the guy who gave it a 0.5.

[Llyranor]

Good reviews? It got horrible reviews. That should teach you not to rely on a single site to make a decision.

 

In any case, what did you EXPECT S-E and Nintendo to tell you? HA HA HA HA HA HA

 

I knew what I was getting into. I knew the game's pros and cons, and knew my tastes (I'm a sucker for Mana , I also enjoy Diablo multiplayer but HATE it singleplayer). So I brought two copies. Not best game ever material, but I got what I expected. I'm especially a sucker for coop, so it was well worth it.

 

What could have also helped it quite a bit is online multiplayer.

[Missy]

Hey, how's Animal Crossing: Wild World? I know Josh was playing it some time ago... I heard some of it takes advantage of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection though I don't plan on using it.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I like it a lot. Cute and addictive. Haven't played since I moved, but this thread has now inspired me to dig the DS out of the boxes....