Remember Nintendo’s first marketing angle for the DS that carried the slogan, ‘Touching is Good’? Talk about risque, especially coupled with the early strain of not-quite-overt-because-they-were-utterly-incomprehensible dating sims that graced the handheld (or ‘graced’–I’m looking at you, Sprung.) Now being of the female persuasion (and despite liking games, sharing few other attributes with men), I wasn’t too quick to hop on board with Feel the Magic XY/XX and start wooing Mute Silhouette Protagonist’s Near-Mute, Blushing Dream Girl. Even if I’d heard that wooing entailed some absurdly fun minigames. So it turns out that FTM is a very charming and personable, pick-up-and-play type of game that’s perfect to cover on the last day of the month when I’m down a few posts. But moreover, Sonic Team has created an endearing, universal story of boy-meets-girl, does crazy stunts in performance troupe of questionable motivations to impress her, and given it retro, cut-out visuals and sexual-revolution-era musical stylings. It’s all unified rather amusingly by a Japanese variety-show sensibility as FTM makes entertaining, challenging use of the mic and touch screen, often in tandem. I recommend this over WarioWare’s scattered, fetish-themed humor any day.

It’s become a virtual impossibility to find Electroplankton in conventional stores, but should you overcome that challenge (read: buy it here!), the impossibility becomes not attaining heights of musical genius by randomly tapping your DS. If you have even the loosest plan when you start the Performance Mode, you can expect to create beautiful music together with the beat-box/sequencer/voice recording software. This game will improve your quality of life even if you opt for Audience Mode, where the computer devises melodies in each of the different plankton environments. Electroplankton is a one-of-a-kind application that’s sometimes a game, but always fun.

It’s an apt description of this fastest of Sonic games at the time. Control what you can, leave the rest to blazing inertia, and for the love of sanity, hit the checkpoints you’re given before Sonic meets his newest doom in the gaping, hedgehog-hungry maw of oblivion. Although it has its share of maddening eccentricities, this revival of the classic 2-D anthropomorph-on-a-rollercoaster model met with the highest critical praise for our much-maligned hero in ten years, and more recently, a sequel. It addressed the millions-strong factions of Genesis devotees who remember Sonic’s glory days, and while nothing can perfectly recapture the bygone era, this is a GOOD SONIC GAME. Rush boasts the challenging half-pipe Special Stages of old and the requisite loops, launchers, and legwork to get to them, in equally-requisite, ginormous Zones inspired by undying love of industrial plants, nature and gambling. Add in the newer, tricktastic rail-grinding set to the vibes of Hideki “Jet Grind Radio DJ” Naganuma, and the only downfall of the game may be its unrelenting speed and lack at several points of solid ground–it’s still a lot of fun and even moreso head-to-head.

Hey, paisanos! You know Mario, right? Dude is kind of hot property in Video Game Land. Apparently Mario is worth more than Harrison Ford, because the games that essentially invented the platformer have grossed more than that actor’s many, many fine films (at least that’s what I retained from my college teacher’s many, many subpar lectures.) Can you imagine that?… and that I haven’t even had the common decency to post about a bonafide Mario game til now? (that doesn’t include the sideshows that have become his primary employ.)

There was big hype around a Mario game that spoke old-school revival a few years back, and while for me, it could not possibly measure up because of flaws inherent to hype, it by all means delivered on the promise of modernizing a classic. New Super Mario Bros. is a jaunty little sojourn through 2-D sidescrollery with the makings of a true Mario game: bricks and enemy heads on which to play leapfrog, pipes to plumb for the expected bonus rooms and coin vaults, paths that branch depending on stage completion, and transformative power-ups that anthropomorphize our hero at least a once. Mario is back in the flesh, but not alone: he’s bringing possibly MY favourite part of the game, the arcade-style multiplayer of Mario Vs. Luigi and the Minigames of Mario 64 DS plus more.

P.S: Super happy points to anyone who recognized the Super Mario Bros. Super Show reference.

No one here better even halfway believe that, no matter how much we love cereals and canned pastas ending with ‘O’. Meteos is a game: as a pretty well-publicized early entrant on the DS scene, I don’t imagine there’s much confusion to that… but one look at the startlingly action-oriented puzzle game, and you do start to wonder: just what is going on with these rocket-blocks and changing gravitational pulls consarnit?!

Meteos is a rare member of the elite in a genre that is full of the average. Q! Entertainment’s puzzler draws on a heritage steeped in synesthetic design–that’s kind of like saying cross-sensory, in plainer English–producing a unified rhythm of sights, sounds, and movement. It’s supposed to draw you further in and block out the outside world, but whether or not you like dancing stick-figure aliens and ambient synths, the ever-paramount gameplay is sublime. In your bid to group three-or-more like pieces that will rocket the stack above off your planet and onto one of your opponents’, be sure to use the touch screen for speeds and technical finesse that are unachievable with conventional digital inputs (and thus in almost all rival games I can think of). Meteos is playable with criminal ease by anyone who ever grabbed a pencil in the public school system. It’s stylish, but best of all, it’s meaty.

Meteos. Available in scampering space-men format and Disney paintjob that allows the coveted book-style holding method, omigosh.

Long had many folks not the creators of Tetris been making variants of the original Russian PC game, and long before they were quite licensed by the creator. There was the trouble of Tengen Tetris versus Nintendo and Bullet-Proof’s version that lead to a court case in ‘89, and while such nastiness over a game that starred nothing but blocks and backgrounds might seem a little excessive, Tetris was (and remains) an intensely lucrative little property. The feuds largely overshadowed the interests of the man who actually made the game, but finally, with the Tetris Company, Alexey Pajitnov has gotten a handle back on his rightful property and is collaborating to make non-shady ports of his game.

That led to the eventual production of Tetris DS, which was made by the people it was supposed to be, for the people it was supposed to be. It features the same block-swivelling and stacking action we all know and love in a bevy of new modes, like move-limited missions to clear the touch screen of all blocks and a shared-screen tug-of-war on the same play field. Add to this a few dozen twists of Nintendo 8-bit that we can now accept as authentic diversions, like the use of Mario items to spice up the classic versus formula, and you have a respectable, portable Tetris to replace the Game Boy edition that you still lug around. You should at least supplement the Game Boy one with Tetris DS for the ease of multiplayer with one card, and online play if you don’t know anybody (but you will :)!

Things are getting a little DS-friendly around here–maybe a little Nintendo-leaning on the whole, too–but who can help it? PriceGrabber is letting you guys do the talking, and if you say that Elite Beat Agents is a 5-star production, you’re going to have to answer for it with a lot of echoed sentiment on this blog.

Even if you can’t very well plug an instrument peripheral into it, the Dual Screen is no stranger to the popular rhythm-game genre. In 2005, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! came out as a Japan-0nly … male cheerleading game. Yeah, you can see why they reworked the theme and came up with the secret agent shtick for the West (although a lot of us imported the original on its own merits). The basic gameplay, which consists of tapping numbered balls in time with the music, remains the same, however pop-culturalized the songs, with covers of the likes of Cher and Good Charlotte, may have become. Throughout the narrative that forms the content-light but laugh-heavy backdrop of the action, people in trouble call out to the Elite Beat Agents to help them dance their way out of distaster in live, love, and work.

… It’s better understood if you just play the thing. Nineteen buyers plus one reviewer makes 20 recommendations for you to get on the Elite Beat! What more do you need?

… with this YouTube video!

You weren’t expecting that, I bet! Well, judicial readers, my trust in your good taste is such that I believe you were intrigued by the above game trailer, which is dead cool, albeit admittedly lacking in real in-game footage. You’re yearning to hear the truth behind it — unless you’ve seen it before. In which case, I trust in your good taste EVEN MORE.

The painfully obvious subject of today’s post is hereby revealed to be the one and only Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, which is, er, the third of three sequels to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Okay, so “one and only” = not true. I kinda gave that away in a previous post. It IS the first to feature a brand-new protagonist and to have been conceived for the DS, unlike the first three, which were actually cleverly-disguised Gameboy Advance ports. That means sharper visuals, more CG movies, better music, and longer cases — I can personally vouch for the quality of each. And loads of touch screen interactivity. The engine remains intact, the gameplay is tried and true, so if you’re any fan of the law (or at least fantasy play-law), you have nothing to lose in picking this one up.

Here’s some news that all DS owners can use … in two months. Oh well, better late than never, I say.

Know that, soon, the most venerated sphere aside from Earth itself and so many more blunt objects will revive in Super Dodgeball Brawlers on the Nintendo DS, 20 years after their NES debut! Technos, those guys who made Double Dragon, River City Ransom, and the remaining cream of the 8-bit crop, may have disbanded, but Arksys has taken the reigns and is due to release this follow-up in Japan any moment now.

With this knowledge that I have just come to possess, and that in this message I have imparted to you, how are we to carry on with the mundane travails of daily life? How to appear unaffected, when through the head, visions of stubby-bodied-yet-ridiculously-athletic high-schoolers dance to surfer music? How to remain calm, when they’re slamming each other stupid, with everything from pandas to the Eiffel tower, and occasionally a dodgeball?

No sellers on PriceGrabber.com appear to list this game yet. Not even the GameBoy Advance edition is anywhere to be found. And the Super Nintendo game only released in Japan, so don’t even try it.

!!! !!! !!!

The answer: plug a related product. IT IS TIME to get a DS — if you have one, then for your 7 closest friends. Because Super Dodgeball Brawlers with insane multiplayer is coming. Cry, beg, work if you have to. Want one of those hard-to-find colors? Take a gander at the Crimson/Black DS. We even have a couple Metallic Pearl DSes still hanging around — already a real collectors item.

I apologize for the long-windedness of this post. Maybe dodgeball will knock the breath out of me.

Nintendo didn’t produce one of their hardest challenges in game form, they just marketed it like one: The Quest to Find DS Games, starring about 400,000,000 North Americans in the English-language version, with extra levels of difficulty when the Western world develops a huge crush on Nintendogs and stuff. Released about two-and-a-half years ago now, the game, set at Christmastime, followed main protagonists Mom and Dad on their trips to every retailer in a 30 kilometre radius as they tried to procure one hen’s tooth, a.k.a. a DS game, while closely monitoring each store’s Supply meter (which always was exceeded by the Demand meter). An elusive cast of antagonists, including near no-shows Trauma Center: Under the Knife and Lost in Blue, foiled many attempts at getting the perfect gift under the tree, and many foiled shoppers have never deigned take up the challenge again.

Which is a shame, because I’m sure some people forgot the games they never had. By a happy marketing coincidence, some of them turned out to be more fun to find than to play. But not this one: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I understand completely that you didn’t want to pay 80 dollars on eBay for this game back when the profiteers were having their way. I understand it is still hard to find all three games of the trilogy, and now that the fourth, brand-new game is out, it seems too late. I realize that the girl on the cover looks like she’s contracted some kind of oral disease. But if you do anything with your DS (and you should be playing games on it, you perv), this is the ONE game worth tracking down.

Seriously, first the worst? Not true, not at all.