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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Should I buy a Nintendo DS?

  
  

Page: 12(3)

 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
13:38 / 28.03.07
I had stopped playing mine for a while, due mostly to working every day and not wanting to bring the DS to work (as I sold them, it would have been irritating to explain every day that, no, this isn't stolen, yes, it is mine, etc).

But I just picked up Puzzle Quest - Challenge of the Warlords, which was a good idea, poorly timed (what with all this uni work I have to do, now). It's a really fun little game, though I'm not very far into it yet. I'm not very good at ball-breaker puzzles, though I like them, which helps.

I'm not going to write any more because there's plenty available on the internets about it, and because I'm going to go play some more.
 
 
Feverfew
20:07 / 28.03.07
Custom Robo Arena proves to be a great deal of fun, with two slight exceptions; the Family RPG element is massively overdone, in a way, in that you Have To Have breakfast and dinner with the family in between doing "Stuff", and the fights are either ridiculously easy or monster hard.

However, I really look forward to taking it online, and the designing and customising of robots is always a plus.

There are two random factors that add value, too; not only can you set your own diorama that the opponent sees prior to the match (posing your robot against a background), but there's a random element to the matches too.

When not robot-ing, your robot remains in cube form. So, when you go in to do the whole battle thing, your cube and the opponent's cube is fired from a central cannon. Dependent on how you land, you take more or less time to stand up. If you land on your front, for instance, you're up straight away, whereas if you land on your head, you have to button-mash to stand up before you get the hell beaten out of you. Then again, I just like random elements, so...

Also, it has fantastically eighties overblown guitar and synth completely out of proportion to the game itself. What's not to love?
 
 
guitargirl
08:36 / 05.04.07
Trauma center is brilliant fun to play, but God it can get so difficult, but its just so addictive!
 
 
Feverfew
19:27 / 22.04.07
Puzzle Quest.

I don't really want to talk about how addictive it is. Considering the simplicity, it's shocking.

It's an RPG crossed with Columns, for the love of [fluffy-deity-of-choice] - how? How? How can it be so addictive?
 
 
Bear
01:16 / 23.04.07
Better be good I've just ordered it after seeing you say that, although to be fair it does sound up my street.

I still play the DS far far more than my PSP, I just love the pick up and play factor of it. Yu-Gi-Oh is probably the game I play the most, I'm a little addicted to Yugi.
 
 
Feverfew
14:20 / 25.05.07
I'm truly turning into a DS kid; for today, I now have Chocobo Tales! Which looks like oddly crazy storybooking giant-yellow-emu-a-like fun.
 
 
COG
20:30 / 09.07.07
I've totally done what I always do and fallen for the hype of a couple of games which push all my buttons but actually fail to entertain me in reality. Nintendogs and Animal Crossing are the guilty pair, and while I will say that they are both good games, I just can't be bothered to play them. I think it's all that brusjing, washing and feeding plus writing letters to your animal buddies. I want to play a game not commit to another way of life.

Anyway, so that leaves Meteos which is cool for 5 mins, but in Japanese and I'm pretty crap at it. Advance wars rocks the box, but I have not found time for it for a while. Electroplankton I'm going to snuggle up in bed with tonight to help me drop off to sleep in lieu of the In Our Time podcast which usually does the trick.

What game do people recommend for me next? I enjoyed Mario & Luigi partners in time, until I didn't anymore. Don't suggest Mario Kart, as the SNES version is the one true God and shall never be usurped.

What happened to those tiny micro games that someone wrote about a while back? Only available in Japan? Orbit? Gravity game thingy sounds right up my street. Anyone remember what I'm talking about?
 
 
semioticrobotic
13:52 / 10.07.07
I remember.
 
 
COG
17:29 / 10.07.07
Cheers Bryan, those are the ones. Orbital is out of stock at the moment, but that and Dotstream are now on my list. They are just what I'm looking for. I have made a new promise to myself that I can play DS if I'm listening to Spanish homework at the same time, and these games look to be fine without the sound on.
 
 
COG
19:16 / 20.07.07
Can I just plug Advance Wars Dual Strike (or in fact any of the versions). I played my first battle for a long time and it illustrated perfectly why this is such a great gaming series.

I'm on the hard campaign at the moment, and I started this battle ok, then fucked up a couple of times and got promptly spanked. The commanders came on to commiserate and gave me some good advice. I followed this at the next attempt, concentrated a bit more and trounced the enemy with a score 1 point off perfect.

This game has so much extra stuff as well, that if you love the basic battle mechanics it will keep you entertained indefinitely. I've never even had the chance to go wireless and battle against a human. Pity it's only local wireless.
 
 
petunia
12:48 / 01.12.07
Just a call for suggestions:

My mother is getting a DS for her birthday and I want to get a game for her. She's explicitly asked for Brain Training, which my father has got for her.

She's never really got into computer games before at all, but I really think she'd enjoy some easy-paced rpg-style games - stuff that doesn't wig your brain out with Teh Fast Fast, but which will still be engaging and perhaps puzzling...

I was thinking something like Animal Crossing would be fun for her. I've not played it, but the stuff I've seen people say online about it makes it seem like a cool little sand-boxy kind of game.

Harvest Moon cropped (haha! 'cropped'..) up as another option.

But before I get one of these, I thought I'd ask the mighty Barbe-mind if there are any Awesome Gems that would fit into this kind of gameplay?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
13:32 / 01.12.07
Zelda: Phantom Hourglass? As the series has grown, it's become significantly more accessible for non-gamers. The DS version's entirely touch-screen driven control is about as non-threatening as you can get.

The visual style of Phantom Hourglass appears to have a large amount of appeal to people who wouldn't traditionally be into videogames, too - it's the same style as Wind Waker, which my old man went for in a big way.

It's also one of the best games on the machine.
 
 
petunia
13:55 / 01.12.07
Ooooh, that's a good idea. Would I be right in thinking the game has a bit more 'direction' than the two I mentioned?
 
 
CameronStewart
16:10 / 01.12.07
My girlfriend recently completed Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations and really enjoyed it. It's a courtroom simulation game in which you play a defense attorney - the bulk of the game is spent in court listening to testimony, cross-examining and presenting evidence. there's a lot of careful reading involved, it's basically an interactive murder mystery story (or stories, there's 5 of them to get through in the game).

She spent a few weeks with it and quite enjoyed it. Good for people who enjoy puzzles, logic, and courtroom drama.
 
 
petunia
16:31 / 01.12.07
Well, she did enjoy Ally McBeal...
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:22 / 01.12.07
Yeah, Zelda's a lot more driven than Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon.

HM does have an ultimate goal, but it's never really the point, and the gameplay can get a bit tiring after a while (plough field, plant crop, water crop, harvest crop, plough field, plant crop...)

Animal Crossing is much more about making your own entertainment. I bought the DS version for my sister a year (or two?) ago, and the fact that she doesn't know anybody else with a copy of it sort of killed the thing immediately - its real strength lies in the communication stuff.

The only issue I have with the Phoenix Wright game is that you often see the solution to a puzzle earlier than you should, but the game allows you no means of jumping straight to it - you always have to go through the steps that the designers wanted you to go through. It's enormously frustrating, realising that one of the people you're questioning is lieing, knowing which piece of evidence will prove it, but having to try and figure out the (often arcane) process required to get Phoenix himself to realise the same thing. Worse when you see a hole in somebody's defense that the designers didn't, and end up trying to win a case with a solution that should be viable, but isn't.
 
 
Axolotl
12:29 / 02.07.08
I'm considering getting a DS - the next gen consoles aren't really doing it for me and they're still a little too expensive considering I don't really have the time or inclination for hardcore gaming anymore. What do people reckon - is the DS likely to satsify my gaming itch? What's the current crop of games like?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:49 / 02.07.08
Excellent, if you look outside of the top twenty. Since buying a DS Lite a month or so back, I've been on a big purchase-athon, of both DS and GBA software.

It largely depends on what kind of thing you're looking for. Obviously, if racing games are your thing, this isn't the handheld you're looking for. Same goes for FPS. Anything else, you're onto a winner. Name a genre and I'll give you two or three fantastic examples on the machine.
 
 
wicker woman
00:27 / 03.07.08
I bought one about 4 months ago in order to play Pokemon with my girlfriend; ended up buying the first Phoenix Wright game and Professor Layton and the Curious Village as well.

Layton is, and I say this easily, one of the best games on the system as far as I can tell. Fantastic animated sequences, an interesting story, and some really good puzzles.

Unfortunately, my DS is at least partly dead, probably due to my having picked it up used. The good majority of the time, when I turn it on, the screens won't light up. And even when they do, whatever game I'm playing will freeze up in a matter of minutes.
 
 
Axolotl
13:35 / 03.07.08
Cheers Randy. The top 20 thing would explain why I'm not really aware of the good games.

Right, genres:
Turn-based strategy (bonus points if it's squad based).
RPGs.
Point & click adventures (or the platform equivilent)
Oh, and maybe a couple of games that are good for a twenty minute blast.

Oh, and a friend of mine (of a more piratical bent) recommends getting an M3 mod card that enables you to access SD cards. Anyone any experience of these or, given that pirates=terrorists who hate our freedoms, that they might have heard from a man in a pub *nudge nudge*.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
15:09 / 03.07.08
final fantasy tactics advance 2? on DS?

must...resist...

the more qualifiers they add onto the name, the better it gets, right?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
17:09 / 03.07.08
I've got it, but haven't begun playing yet - I started the GBA one over from scratch again fairly recently and want to polish that off before moving on.

Turn-based strategy:

Rondo of Swords. Pretty bloody difficult, but does some interesting things with the genre. Instead of each unit having one phase for movement and one for attacking/defending, they only have a single phase per turn. The other side of that is that units can attack by moving through enemy units - you draaw a path through them and your unit attacks as it moves. Really interesting idea that works well, but requires a fundamental rethink in your approach.

Luminous Arc

Either (or both) of the Advance Wars games for the machine. Both are essential if you're a fan of the genre. The first is more or less the same game as the two GBA releases, but slightly easier and with even more content, the second has the same gameplay but a bunch of new unit types and a completely new visual style. They're insanely good fun, even if they're both, as I say, a bit on the easy side at the regular difficulty setting.

The port of the PS1 version of the original Front Mission is also worth a peek, but feels clunky nowadays. Again, though, it's still worth buying.

The two Advance Wars games are easily the best examples of the genre on the machine. The other games mentioned all have greater failings.

Shit, sorry. I'll have to carry on later.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:59 / 06.07.08
So, RPGs. Weirdly, you're a bit stuck if you want something traditionally JRPG-y. The remake of Final Fantasy III is nice enough, but the original game's age shows up in its structure, gameplay and unwillingness to adapt to you as the player.

And that's about it so far, unless I've missed something obvious. The future holds DS remakes of FFIV and Dragon Quests IV, V and VI. There's also a new Valkyrie Profile coming to the machine at some point and rumour (caused by the sudden appearance of this website) has it that Squenix are working on a DS version of Chrono Trigger.

There are a bunch of really nice RPG-style things available for it, though. Things that are RPG offshoots, if that makes sense - the less obvious type of game in the genre.

The DS version of Pokemon didn't grab me as much as I'd hopedd it would, but you've got to bear in mind that I'd played all the previous games by this point and had also just managed to fully complete the Pokedex in Ruby about a month before the DS game was released, so I was a bit burned out by the series.

There's also Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, which is basically Pokemon in a Dragon Quest style. I started playing it this afternoon and it's good fun so far.

The World Ends With You is a unique spin on the genre and goes to great lengths to use the DS functionality as much as it possibly can. I'm not keen, but most other people love it.

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime does RPGing in a similar style to older Zeldas - lots of environmental puzzles, so more of a top-down platformer, really. It's a very light game, but also really funny and absolutely worth your time.

Etrian Odyssey is a fantastic, old-school dungeon crawler. Think Eye of the Beholder. first person, grid-based movement, player team entirely player-defined, massively challenging. It even goes so far to nod towards its origins that it demands you draw a map out as you play, with the novelty being that the map is placed and drawn on the machine's touchscreen. The US version is horribly difficult to find, but it's just recently been released in Europe. Typically, the announcement of the Euro release came three days after I'd finally sourced the US one. There's also a sequel, just released in the US and yet to be confirmed for Europe.

Two Rogue-likes have been released for the machine in the US to date - Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer and Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. Shiren is the better of the two, by some distance, but Izuna isn't without its own charm and is significantly easier than Shiren. Id definitely get Shiren first, though.

Contact is another truly unique RPG experience. It's far better than TWEWY, in my opinion. It's been terribly overlooked, but it's essential if you're at all interested in innovation within the medium. Grasshopper are the people behing Killer7 and No More Heroes, and this has a similar feeling of bravery and invention. It's not entirely successful in what it tries to do, but that's a minor issue.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:05 / 06.07.08
And, now that I check that link again, I see that the page has changed to a confirmation of Chrono Trigger DS.
 
 
iamus
21:50 / 06.07.08
Did you ever finish Chrono Trigger, Randy?

Absolute belter of a game, that.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
18:47 / 07.07.08
I didn't, no. I reached a bit that required some grinding - the main storyline kind of ran out of steam, which led me to believe that I just had the optional dungeons to polish off before going for the end boss battle, but I was underpowered for all of them. I've been meaning to go back to it, but I've other things on the go now. Had a period of time - still not over - where I found it difficult to stick with any one game through to the end.

Point & click adventures to get for the DS? The two Touch Detective games are musts. I don't know what the situation is wrt European releases of these, but they're easy enough to pick up from somewhere like VG+.

Another Code/Trace Memory is another necessary purchase, as mentioned earlier in this thread.

Phoenix Wright? Not a fan, myself. The first game is decent enough, but the second - Justice for All - isn't. In fact, it's rubbish. I've been assured that the third - Trials & Tribulations - is the bets of the three, and an excellent title in its own right.

As for the twenty minute blast things, along with those already mentioned earlier in the thread I'd recommend:

Slitherlink (puzzle game only released in Japan to date, but perfectly understandable once you've got a translation of the menus, which I've stolen from elsewhere and whacked up here.)

42 All-Time Classics (US version goes by the name of Clubhouse Games, or something along those lines), a collection of loads of card and board games which is horribly addictive.

Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, a fun little RTS thing that's perfectly suited for picking up to polish off one or two missions at a time (it's otehrwise a bit repetitive).

Treasure/Sega's Bleach beat 'em ups (well, I've played the first, but as the second is an expanded version of that...)

Meteos, a glorious mess of a 'falling brinks/well' puzzle game. there's a Disney-themed version available, but as half of the appeal of the original is the way that the sound effects all mash together to create these sort of real-time, improvised tunes, I'd pass it and go for the first. Also, Disney characters generally make me want to retch.

Contra 4 might be worth a punt too, if you can put up with the stupidly punishing difficulty of the first couple of levels. It gets really good once they're out of the way. This is yet another one that's yet to see the light of day in Europe, btw.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
19:09 / 07.07.08
The future holds DS remakes of FFIV and Dragon Quests IV, V and VI.

alright, that's it. I don't know if anyone else tried the ROMs for DQ 5 and 6 but they both made me happy inside. especially 6 - which was frustrating because I don't believe it was ever fully translated.

big fan of CT too, especially the PS version with added cutscenes and bonus unlockable stuff.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:48 / 07.07.08
I should also point out that yr DS has a port for GBA games, and that you should make use of it. GBA releases can either be insanely expensive or insanely cheap, depending on how lucky you are. The handhaled format has always been sneered at by the industry and critics, which is a crime. The end result is that games get released in tiny quantities, then disappear.

So, what happens is you either find them in car boot sales, or pound shops, or yr local indie, for a few quid a pop. Or, alternatively, you have to resort to paying megabucks for them on eBay, running the risk that you'll get one of the billions of duff bootlegs that infest the world with their rubbishness.

But it's worth it, absolutely. I've started obsessively hunting down all of the GBA games that I missed out on originally - because of the horrible constraints of both time and cash I was operating under when they were released - over the last couple of months. I'm feeling lazy now, tho, so a list is all you're getting until either I can be arsed to expand on it or somebody asks me a question about a specific game. Also remember that there are previous GBA recs all over the place in this forum.

So:

TBS: Advance Wars 1 & 2, Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (Fire Emblem is from the same people as Advance Wars, and is aces), Rebelstar: Tactical Command (basically portable Laser Squad, only clunkier), Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Tactics Ogre (rare as dodo shit).

RPGs: All of the Final Fantasy remakes, Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (or its sequel, both are nice little RPGs with Tales... style combat), Golden Sun, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Zelda: A Link to the past/Four Swords Adventures, Zelda: Minnish Cap, Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand (great game with the novelty of having a light sensor built into the cart, for the business of destroying vampires with real sunlight).

Others: Shaman King: Master of Spirits (fantastic platform game that nods to the Metroid series), Metroid: Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, Legend of Stafy 1, 2 & 3 (Japan-only Nintendo platform game series that's absolutely lovely), Gradius Galaxies (superb shooter, easily ona par with the games in the main Gradius series).

And just shitloads of others. Honestly, if you're only playing DS games on yr DS, you're not playing the best of what's available for it. I'd take most of my GBA games over the DS ones any day of the week.
 
 
Axolotl
14:35 / 08.07.08
Cheers for the advice Randy, certainly appears that there's plenty of stuff out there that falls way under my radar. I'll let you know if I manage to pick one up.
 
 
trouble at bill
17:46 / 02.10.08
Just a bump on account of the new DSi appearing in Japan very soon. Full details here. Though I don't think this one has a GBA port.
 
  

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