Okamiden will leave Okami fans feeling nostalgic, the world is the same, some key characters return, and there’s even sections of the game that feel as if they were directly lifted from the overlooked and legendary original game, to the extent that on occasion it strays into remake territory.

This time around you take charge of Chibiterasu, the son of the original games’ wolf goddess Amateratsu. Chibi, as he’s most often known, is a cute wolf cub that is an immediately likeable little fellow as soon as you set your eyes on him.

The story is just as wordy as the first game and whilst it’s not always terribly interesting, the sense of humour prevalent throughout is wonderful. One example is the fact that Chibi is accompanied by different characters throughout, all of which give him their own unique name, with Chibi’s reaction to these monikers always being amusing dismay.

Okami was a game that was renowned as much for its beauty as anything else, so it was a bit disappointing up on hearing that Okamiden, its sequel, was heading to the much punier DS, where much of its loveliness would surely be lost, but it’s a far more authentic representation of the glorious visual style than was expected. The world isn’t as seamless and there’s some heavy framerate dips on occasion, but it’s still a graphically arresting game that is easily amongst the DS’s finest looking titles.

The DS and Okamiden go together beautifully from a control standpoint too. It unsurprisingly makes liberal use of the formats touch screen and, whilst on the PS2 and Wii versions of the original game, it could occasionally be tricky to draw certain shapes, the stylus of the DS results in it being a more pleasing and natural process.

Structurally, Okamiden is identical to its predecessor, so there’s a sizable world to explore and heading into new areas will often see you having to revitalize an area, resulting in a rewarding festival of colour. Over the course of the game, Chibi will pick up new abilities of which allows you to reach areas that were previously inaccessible to you. There’s plenty of dungeons too, of which rarely test you in a mental capacity, but are nonetheless well designed.

The combat is much the same as it was in Okami, so in short it’s enjoyable but could be better. It’s certainly shown off in its best light in the more demanding boss encounters, of which are just as epic and memorable as you’d expect from Capcom – a developer that has brought to us many fantastic boss encounters over the years.

Okamiden is once again set in the beautiful, occasionally ominous, land of Nippon and it’s largely all the same areas that were featured in Okami, though due to technical constraints, each area is split into small chunks. This to begin with offers a warm familiarly to fans, though as pleasant as the world often is, over time some will still get tired of not having many new areas to sniff around.

Bringing a fresh slant to the game however are the partner characters. These ride around on Chibi’s back, have their own unique ability and are incorporated into the puzzles in fairly predictable ways. Letting them off your back, also allows you to guide them simply by drawing a line from them to the intended area to areas that are inaccessible to Chibi. They’re a welcome addition that go some way to making the old feel relatively new, it certainly helps that they’re a likeable bunch.

The formula of Okami hasn’t been translated to the DS completely problem free and for some it will recall its forbear far too often, but it’s still an excellent shrunk down version, with visual splendour in abundance and a sizable world, with plenty in the way to do and for many that will be more than enough.

7/10

Who’d want the job of a concept writer?  You spend days, months, slaving over an idea.  You’re sure it’s a winner.  You get it all polished, every facet sparkling with innovation, then hand your baby over to the developer.  Next thing you know, they’ve butchered your vision, your masterpiece.  The ‘game’ they’ve produced is nothing like the beautiful shining concept you turned in.  I’ve no proof, but I’m pretty sure this happens more than you’d like to imagine.

Fortunately for the concept writer for the Scribblenauts series, their mad idea not only was possible, but it worked.  And it was a mad idea; a game with a magic notebook, where you could conjure up just about anything you liked, from food to weapons to animals to the Kraken itself.  The game set up little self-contained puzzles and set the player loose solving them with all the tools they could imagine.  It had its problems, of course, but on the most part the game worked pretty well.  Given the strength of the concept and the relatively minor quibbles the critics had with the title, an improved sequel seemed inevitable.

Well, here it is.  Super Scribblenauts, the great golden hope of 5th Cell and Warner Bros, to go where no dictionary-based action-adventure puzzler has gone before.  It’s…okay, I suppose.  Clearly 5th Cell have listened closely to their reviews and to the general playing public, and tweaked this iteration accordingly, and turned out a polished piece of software.  However, I think it would be a good idea to recap the whole Scribblenauts concept for anyone fresh to the scene.

The only way to safely jump off a cliff is a parachute, or is it? Most likely not.

In Scribblenauts, and Super Scribblenauts, you control Maxwell, a boy with a pencil and a huge imagination or some sort of extradimensional superhero.  It’s never really made clear.  Anyhow, you move between short set piece levels, solving simple puzzles by magicking objects into existence to help, hinder or cause havoc in order to earn ‘starites’ to move on to the next stage.  The dictionary in both games is astonishing, with even the most unexpected noun being summonable.  This time round, all nouns can be tweaked with adjectives, allowing you to create such wonders as a ‘tiny shrew’, ‘golden shamrock’ and ‘flying saucepan’.

In Super Scribblenauts, 5th Cell have taken the extremely smart decision to improve the control scheme.  In the first game, Maxwell moved about in response to where the player touched the screen.  Also, the placement of items was controlled by the touchscreen.  This lead to frequent and frustrating deaths in the later, fiddlier puzzles when Maxwell would suddenly leap to his doom if you miss-touched the screen by the finest amount.  Now, in their wisdom, the developers have seen fit to allow us to control Maxwell with the D-pad instead.  It’s amazing the difference this makes.  In completing the first game, I built up an incredible hatred towards my little sprite, with his gangly walk and erratic lemming tendancies.

Unfortunately, despite all the improvements, there’s still something that doesn’t quite click about Super Scribblenauts. For all their freedom to spawn whatever you please, the levels feel too restrictive, too small and too short to be satisfying.  More than half your time playing the game is spent looking at menus, informational pop-ups and listening to the same victory music over and over.  What would be infinitely better than the bite-sized morsels of fun would be a more seamless experience, with less menus and hand-holding and more letting the player run riot with the world.  Maybe it’s too much to ask for a Scribblenauts RPG, but the game would work well in that format.  Instead of disparate, narrative-less episodes we could have side quests and an over-arching story quest.  Sure, balancing a player with the ability to call into existance massive monsters to fight by his side would be tricky, but that would be one hell of a game.

Something else I would say about Super Scribblenauts is that the adjective system isn’t quite as clever as the developers seem to think it is.  The ability to make a sad robot or an angry nerd is pretty handy, but the way the adjective puzzles have been built is boring.  Instead of the little story-ettes that most of the puzzles are based around, the adjective puzzles are mostly three empty boxes with an item in two of the boxes and an empty space to be filled in the third.  The puzzle is creating something that shares properties of the two other things.  Fun the first time, boring by the umpteenth.

The game includes a much improved level editor.

Speaking of boring, the reuse of sound effects and music from the first to the second game was one of the worst decisions that the developers could have made.  Admittedly, storage space is at a premium on a DS cart, so most games for the platform tend to have only a few different tunes set to repeat on the levels.  However, I was so sick of hearing the Scribblenauts music by the end of the first game that the moment I heard it again on this title I muted the sound.  Different tunes, and given how often you hear it, different victory music, would have gone a long way.  Reusing assets just seems lazy.

One other thing I’d say about the game; looking at it on face value, you’d imagine it to be a game aimed at kids, especially from the cartoon-y graphics and mini-levels, suitable for those with short attention spans.  Well, without sounding too up myself, I’m a University educated professional with a life-long love of reading, and I struggled to come up with synonyms enough to satisfy some of the puzzles in the early levels, particularly when going for gold completion of some of them (this involves doing the puzzle three times in a row without repeating any words).  It’s hard to see a child putting up with it for long.  This means that all the child-friendly pop-ups repeating simple concepts and puzzle hand-holding are unnecessary distractions from the enjoyment for the inevitable older player.

Super Scribblenauts was a difficult game to keep playing through.  When the first game was released, the concept was enough to carry it along to completion, with the novelty of the dictionary concept enough to make up for the shortcomings.  This time around, the dictionary just isn’t as new and different.  There’s a definite feeling of “oh yeah, seen that, now what” that the adjective system cannot overcome.  It’s unfortunate, because if Scribblenauts hadn’t have been released and Super Scribblenauts was the debut title of the series, I’d most likely be raving about it.

6/10

Shin Megami Tensei (SMT) titles have quite the reputation: demons, angels, science, religion, deep character and story development and oh yes, being unapologetically difficult. Devil Survivor not only manages to squeeze the SMT experience onto the DS but successfully with a unique tactical RPG hybrid system. Fusing with this departure in gameplay style is an interesting story which is gripping to the end. The fates of teenage Japanese youngsters are par the course in JRPGs but this addictive tactical RPG stands out from the crowd. While not for the faint of heart, easily frustrated or those of religiously sensitive stature, Devil Survivor is an involving and rewarding game experience.

Devil Survivor is set in the present day where demons are running amok on the streets of Tokyo forcing the government to lock the city down and seal everyone in with the malevolent beings. There is little of Devil Survivor that is light-hearted with the exception of the series demon staples such as Jack Frost ho ho ho-ing away and others cracking jokes. Better get those number crunching, strategy hats on then, this is not going to be an easy ride.  Fortunately your protagonist and his buddies become the owners of COMPS (basically Nintendo DS systems, a neat 3^rd wall element) which have a mysterious demon summoning program installed on them. As a result, the protagonist also notices numbers hovering over their heads indicating how many days they have left to live, unfortunately the number tends to be 0. Thus a race against death begins, and ultimately the fate of others.

So between battles and cut-scenes most of the game time is spent in the COMP menu; from here a stylish map of Tokyo is presented with locations to visit, battles to engage in and people to talk to. It’s a laconic system and makes options crystal clear and easy to grasp. Everything is just a few button presses away (no touch screen though disappointingly) from auctioning for new demons, fusing demons to make more powerful allies and tailoring teams for combat. It’s well presented enough as well with both the 2D character art used in cutscenes and the detailed isometric graphics during battles being colourful and coherent. Anyone familiar with the SMT series will feel like they never left with many old demon faces reappearing as well as new designs. Some of the demons are particularly imaginative, it’s a shame the DS screen is so small as the artwork screams for Hi-Res. Characters and enemies are animated with a cute flare in battle too which, while maybe slightly at odds with the content, does make the more violent scenes that little bit more disturbing.

The game is progressed by choosing from a selection of events that occur each day. These must be picked wisely as key advancing events eat 30mins of the finite time in-game. This becomes critical as the story progresses and presents beard-stroking dilemmas to pour over, which satisfyingly make a real difference to the outcome of the story not just in terms of the ending, but in terms of the fate of other characters. In addition to this the effects of choices are often serendipitously uncovered days later which combined with a single save slot means these choices become completely irrevocable, giving them satisfying weight.

Combat wise, Devil Survivor possesses a blend of two tried and tested turn-based systems which are integrated to create something quite surprisingly, well, good. The battles are managed with an isometric view of the battle field, typically streets ravaged by riots and demon activity which progressively degenerate as the lockdown progresses. Placing up to four team members on the field flanked by 2 demons each, the battle then plays out in a turn based fashion; movement is grid based. However, once units are in striking distance the game switches to a 1st-person, 3-on-3 turn based slug out. The key here is to overcome the enemy efficiently and brutally without taking losses to boost experience collected. As this is a SMT game identifying and exploiting the demons’ weaknesses is essential to success and serves as the backbone to team strategy. There is enough complexity in collecting new skills and distributing them to your characters to keep it stimulating. While battles can be challenging, bosses in particular offer substantial air-punching moments when winning tactics triumph. Hell yeah!

Easily for me the most enthralling and gripping aspect of the game was tinkering in the pre-battle setup and fusion system before watching my carefully crafted team make tasty demon jam. As the game doesn’t offer the usual carrot and stick mechanic with items, this is the main reward and channel for progression. Even though the system effectively hands out the recipes taking out the discovery element, it’s still an exciting experience to see your new allies rack up and take your side to give previously impossible enemies a stern butt-kicking. Tailoring them to my overall strategy was like moulding Tetris pieces to fix the weaknesses in my otherwise solid team. Getting that perfect blend of skills to compliment the main characters had all of the satisfaction of a great puzzle and remained the strongest element to continue playing.

However, the battles can grate a bit and never pushed me to the absolute limit like the Etrian Odyssey series does for example, other than the brutal gargantuan bosses. I also felt the board section of battles didn’t offer much room for strategy, particularly in terms of unit placement. Often the only decision was, “should I give the faster units a head start by placing them further out or give the space to the slow coaches?” Instead it relies heavily on mixing enemy types to throw demon- shaped spanners in the gears, but overall strategy is limited and instead focuses more on the pre-battle detail for creativity. Granted the mission objectives are varied up a bit with escort, defence, collect and assassinate scenarios but it all boils down to the same thing. The balance is also questionable in the late game with boss shaped brick walls vehemently slapping me around far too often resulting in forced grinding to develop my team. Insultingly so in the final action-packed day where I had to hang around beating on low level demons to buff up my tamed beasts in order to even stand a chance. Sorry chaps, I just need to get to Lv.65 before I can take you on, would you mind waiting for a few hours? Cup of tea and a scone? It just didn’t sit with the otherwise oppressive atmosphere and urgency felt by the characters.

Speaking of characters and story for that matter, for a game that is almost completely driven by narrative and character interaction it ultimately falls a bit short of Altus’ normal high standards. The story is intense and exciting for the most part and offers a promising foundation exploring the themes of myth, death, religion and the potentially destructive effect of technology on society. I think the main problem was that the characters were not developed enough to marry the adult nature of the tale and left me rather nonchalant.  I felt that at times that they were merely there as padding and vessels for selecting different paths through the game. The lightly animated manga artwork that represents the main characters is great however and convey more emotion then they have any right to, but the dialogue is generally superfluous hindering my empathy for them. Granted the intrigue and suspense was gripping but the ending my decisions chose was as subtle as a slap in the face with a Bible. And nobody likes that.

Bible-bashing aside, Devil Survivor is an excellent tactical RPG and possesses an interesting story, an addictive fusion system for crafting new demons which is exciting and keeps the battles engaging right up until the end. However, the boss difficultly is erratic and never feels balanced to the extent that it will have many walking out. The story kept drawing me back with its well constructed branching paths for the characters and delivered some interesting themes, but I was disappointed with my ending; there are 6 to choose from so maybe I was just unlucky. I suspect most SMT players will know before even reading this review if they want to play Devil Survivor and to them I say go for it. For everyone else out there, if this style of surviving a demon apocalypse doesn’t resonate then you might want to look elsewhere. I personally enjoyed Devil Survivor but I don’t think I have the energy for a second bout at the apocalypse.

7/10

*ahem*

Cooking Mama. The one thing you can’t say about it is “dreary”. From the opening sequence, to the music, to the animations, nothing about this game is dreary. The graphics are bright and sharp on the DS’s lovely little screens and the music and sound effects are crisp and quirky. From the simple task of cooking rice, to preparing a complicated squid dish, everything is beautifully and surprisingly well animated, given that animating falling rice could be considered too pedantic to be worth the effort. Nevertheless, they bothered and it paid off.

Given the slightly weird subject matter (cook stuff, for pretty much no reason), it would be understandable for the developer to attempt to shoe-horn in some ridiculously over-the-top storyline about a cute Anime girl saving her ancestor’s famous restaurant from imminent destruction by sushi-hating culinary ninjas. Thankfully, no-one thought about that, so what we’re left with is a game without a storyline, focused simply on making tasty food by following the onscreen instructions and examples. Players are allowed to practice new techniques and dishes before attempting to cook them to Cooking Mama’s exacting standards. The aforementioned lack of plot means that there is no characterisation whatsoever. Cooking Mama is the sole game character, but one whose only role is either to shower you with praise or scream at you in fury, eyes ablaze (literally, for some reason). Thankfully, that’s the extent of her interference with your fun. No poorly translated dialogue. Not even bizarre over-sized cartoon boobs jiggling before you, in all their 2-d glory. In fact, the total lack of the usual Japanese craziness that I’ve come to expect from games such as these was worryingly absent. Maybe the jiggly boob artist was off sick that day.

As for the food, the dishes available to cook are rather interesting. Very few of them are boring Western dishes – imagine how tedious cooking burgers and turkey twizzlers would get after a while. No, the food you can cook is thoroughly Japanese and therefore interesting, colourful and occasionally inspiring. You mightn’t think it, but it’s even possible to pick up a few pointers from Cooking Mama. I certainly had no idea how to dice vegetables before playing, and my girlfriend finally learnt how to get prawns out of their shells without having to mash them into little bits. The occasional non-Japanese dish makes a nice change, such as pizza or curry. Some are a bit wacko, and seem to suggest that someone was running out of ideas by the end of the developing process. A sandwich? Instant noodles?

Cooking the various meals involves following a variable number of simple steps to craft your culinary masterpiece. Control of the game is solely by the touchscreen, where the majority of the action takes place. Cooking Mama shows off the versatility of the DS’s lower screen, allowing you to roll up spring rolls, slice onions and pound beef with equal ease. Some mini-games follow a simple DDR format, wherein you might have to add ingredients, stir or blow on the microphone to cool things down in time to the little progress bar on the upper screen. my sole criticism of these sequences is that they are just too easy. The various actions never come close enough together to present anything near a challenge for most people with some degree of coordination. Also, some of the mini-games are rather counter-intuitive, such as peeling potatoes. Oh, how I now resent peeling potatoes. The mini-game itself should be simple enough. Using downward strokes with the peeler, the player must strip each potato of its skin within the time period. However, the game is unbelievably pedantic when it comes to removing even the slightest invisible sliver of potato before allowing you to move on. It also is surprisingly difficult to peel in a straight line, with the slightest deviation to the left or right resulting in a failure to peel. As an irishman, and a firm fan of potatoes, I feel it is unjust of Cooking Mama to punish me so.

Aside from that, the rest of the mini-games are great fun. None of the dishes are particularly long, meaning that the game is instantly suitable for the hand-held gamer on the go. Creating some of the more complex dishes is very satisfying, and the option to modify some dishes half-way through adds a certain degree of replayability. Completing one dish unlocks a new one for you to master. With 72 dishes available, the game offers a considerable amount of variation and longevity. Also, the game allows you the option of combining some dishes, to create more complicated meals, though these are unrated, as well as a sort of time-trial mode to test your skills.

With its instant pick-up-and-play nature, and the intuitive nature of the DS’s touchscreen, this makes a great game to encourage people to start playing games. The unusual subject matter, the high quality of the execution and the appealing music and animation mean that Cooking Mama will charm pretty much any gamer or non-gamer alike. So long as you don’t go into it expecting depth or serious amounts of replayability, Cooking Mama is sure to be a recipe for success.

(sorry)

7/10

Having been a fan of Harvest Moon, both on its Snes and Gameboy Color incarnations, I was extremely keen to get my hands on a copy of Harvest Moon DS. Imagining utilising the touch-screen to use tools, pick crops and care for my animals gave me a warm glow inside. I was expecting something along the lines of Animal Crossing. What is presented is a game that seems more basic by far in some areas, yet almost too complex in others.

So once I saw an imported copy in my local independent games emporium, I snapped it up. Keen to relive past glories of farming yore, I slapped the cartridge into my trusty Lite and switched on. Cue one of the longest and more arduous starting sequences of any DS game I have yet experienced. It’s never-ending, and frankly ridiculous, premise seemed sure to continue for far longer than I intended on playing the game. If it’s cutting edge plot-lines and characterisation you’re looking for, I would suggest you go elsewhere.

The plot, so much as it as, revolves around the Harvest Goddess, who has been zapped into another dimension by a not-so-evil witch. I say not so evil, because immediately after banishing her foe into the next dimension, she becomes instantly regretful and attempts to send the Harvest Goddess’s minions, the Harvest Sprites to go get her. True to form, she zaps them into another dimension as well. Honestly…

However, (conveniently) you (the player) happen to saunter up to the scene of the crime. The witch tasks you with rescuing the Harvest Goddess, so that she can continue her un-remitting battle of good vs. evil etc. etc. In order to do this, the player will have to rescue all one hundred and one harvest sprites from the ether beyond. This great feat of magical prowess is achieved by completing farm chores. Handy that, considering this is a farming game.

Anyway, you’d think that having sat through all that, the game would back off and let you play. Nope, as you now have to be introduced to a number of concepts, including harvest sprite assist system and others (more on this later).

An interesting point to note is the number of references made to older, GBA incarnations of the franchise. The game drops hints of the existence of the two older games released to the GBA during the extended intro, as well as allowing connectivity between the GBA cartridge and the DS game when both are inserted into the console. Having never played these incarnations (or to be honest, known of their existence), I cannot really comment regarding this. However, it is the first time I’ve seen something like this featured in a DS game, but it feels like a sneaky bit of stealth advertising to make people buy outdated games.

Anyway, once the game releases you from the starting sequence, it’s time to get to work. All the usual Harvest Moon staples are present, from tilling land to plant crops, which must then be watered and eventually harvested, to raising livestock for profit. Players can also go mining to raise extra cash and to find ores to use to upgrade tools. You begin with a dog, a cat and two bags of seeds. From there on, it’s up to you to generate enough cash to make your farm thrive.

It seems important to point out here that Harvest Moon looks just like any other Harvest Moon game ever created for handheld consoles. There has been no attempt made to introduce 3D graphics or characters any more complicated than pixelated sprites. It is only possible to play from a male perspective, both in terms of the player’s avatar and the dating potentials present in the village. This seems rather limited, especially following the success of Animal Crossing, which proved that good graphics and varied characters are possible in a handheld game.

Indeed, the game also feels rather limited in its characterisation. There has been little attempt to make the other in-game characters anything more than decoration. The usual business with dating and marriage is present, but attempting to start conversations with other characters is a pointless exercise. They will repeat the same piece of dialogue over and over, until you’re sick of it. Tracking down which character lives where, and also where the businesses that aren’t listed via the telephone system through with you make the majority of your purchases is arduous in the extreme. The map has no handy labels (i.e. those found in the Animal Crossing maps), and the businesses themselves have no signs outside to indicate where they are.

Another gripe is that the Power Berries of the previous games have been dropped, replaced instead with a Stamina/Fatigue system, of which the stats cannot be raised. They can only be boosted during the day by eating various foods and plants, but this soon gets arduous. A cooking system is available, once the necessary bits and bobs have been collected, but it’s far too much effort to go through all the trial-and-error to work out.

The farming tasks themselves, however, are highly entertaining. While planting and growing crops is always a bit boring, raising animals is a joy. Even designing your farm is fun, as you have to gather resources and money before choosing where the carpenter will build the various barns and animal sheds you need. The ability to customize your environment like this is a nice addition to the series, and gives the player a real sense of developing their own farm. Also nice is the fact that you are no longer restricted to planting crops on your own land. Throughout the valley, there are a number of plots available for cultivation. Some of these vary in soil quality, and therefore the rate at which crops grow and their quality depends on where you site them. This adds a little to the experience of crop farming, giving you a bit to puzzle over when planting anew.

The lack of any meaningful touchscreen interaction is disappointing. The majority of the game is controlled by the analogue buttons, with the touch-screen only used for navigating menus and for stroking your animals (once the right tool has been purchased). Compared to Animal Crossing, this is very disappointing.

Another major downside of the game is the amount of glitches. In my game, I have experienced disappearing pets, disappearing townspeople, disappearing items and more crashes than I can count. The final straw came when I managed to accidentally set off a glitch that filled my coffers with over 1,000,000,000 units of currency, making the whole premise of the game (farm for money) obsolete. Once you’ve got unlimited cash, there’s not much point in growing things any more, and so the appeal of doing so just wears off.

All in all, however, this is an entertaining game, which has eaten up a considerable amount of my spare time. While limited in some respects, it is sufficiently deep to be enjoyable. A great addition to the Harvest Moon franchise, but a slightly disappointing addition to the DS library.

6/10

With Mega Man ZX, the advent of the latest Mega Man series of games, not much has changed. From first impressions, the game still revolves around jumping, running and blasting. Mega Man is still blue, and still can’t shoot any way but forwards. So far, so good, at least from a retro purist perspective. The graphics are excellent, with highly detailed sprites and backgrounds, along with clean, clear menu systems and a lot of well-animated, extraordinarily varied enemies to blast into shrapnel. The ravaged cityscapes in particular appealed to me, with deliciously cracked and chasm-like freeways to leap across, and abandoned cars to blast. Maybe that’s just me, though. It reminded me of my delightful Belfast childhood.

*ahem*

So, the graphics are good. Capcom obviously put some thought into things. Nice little graphical touches, such as the way cars sink into their suspension when you jump on them, or the funny little Japanese anime videos that occur during important plot points, really bring the game to life. However, as the cliché goes, graphics aren’t everything. For Mega Man ZX to have any lasting appeal, the gameplay must be top-notch. Fortunately, Capcom would have struggled to make a mess of the Mega Man formula. The platforming element is as pleasurable as always, with a real sense of achievement coming from conquering a particularly difficult section of precision jumping. Furthermore, the combat is fast-paced and fun. As already mentioned, Mega Man can’t shoot up. It isn’t very clear why. Possibly his gun-arm rusted up during the twenty years he’s been on the go. Who knows? As a game-play mechanic, it means that half the battle is getting a vantage point from which you can actually hit your enemy, before moving to dodge their slow-moving projectiles. Your opponents all move and fire to pre-determined patterns. Gears of War-quality AI it might not be, but the old-school appeal is absolute.

The plot of Mega Man ZX is surprisingly intriguing. Following on from the previous games in the series, this iteration sees you take control of either a boy named “Vent” or a young lady named “Aile”, 200 years after the end of the last series. Apparently, humanoids and Reploids now live in harmony. Further gibberish occurs as maverick robots (known collectively as Mavericks, handily) start attacking, while a shadowy corporation known as Slither Inc. attempt to keep order. Rather unsurprisingly, Slither Inc. turn out to be quite nefarious as well as shadowy, though what people expected from a large conglomerate with a name like “Slither”, I’m not sure. The player comes into contact with biometal, a high-tech remnant of old warriors from aeons past, that literally give Mega Man a fresh breath of life. Not only does it actually bring Mega Man back to life, but collecting the various shards of biometal give him new abilities. Fairly early on, a new weapon beyond the blaster opens up. Mega Man was cool enough with a gun, but with a sword that chops enemies in half? Defeating bosses gives you access to new Mega Man models, with new weapons and abilities. These new abilities are the only way in which the touchscreen is used in Mega Man ZX. Aside from triggering these bonus weapons, the game is controlled entirely by the DS’s buttons and D-pad. For a platformer, though, this isn’t much of a handicap.

Another interesting aspect of Mega Man ZX is the actual layout of the world in which you battle. Missions are accepted from terminals scattered throughout the environment. After receiving the brief and location of the target, it’s entirely up to the player to navigate the world and track down their objective. The world is laid out in zones, through which you will have to battle many times on your travels. It may sound tiresome to have to move through the same environment time after time, but in fact, there is a great deal of satisfaction to be found in traversing familiar territory in order to use your new abilities to open up new areas. Furthermore, by offering multiple missions at once, the player is given a sense that the game is non-linear to a certain degree.

If you’re after a game that will entertain you throughout those boring summer holidays, or if you’re looking for a retro rush of nostalgic, yet fresh gameplay, Mega Man ZX is your game. It’s perfect for short action-packed blasts, and will always leave you hankering for more, and the lack of fancy 3-D visuals is more than made up for by quality, solid gameplay. So long as the cheesy plot and the occasional frustration of getting lost on the way to a mission doesn’t bother you, Mega Man ZX will provide hours of enjoyment.

8/10

Despair not, ye zealots, for the cavalry is a-coming. ANNO 1701: Dawn of Discovery (hereafter ANNO 1701) is the latest in a growing number of PC strategy franchises to make port (badum-tish) on the DS, a pretty damn intellectual proposition which should come as a welcome relief to all those gamers sick of flinging cartoon vegetables around or prodding their Nintendogs. What did you think all that Brain Training was for, fun?

The year, as you may have guessed, is 1701. You are a captain in a thinly disguised variant of Great Britain, and your Queen has commanded you to colonise the ‘New World’ archipelago before those over-sexed Spaniard fellows walk off with the booty, rascally blighters. Beginning with a single exploration ship and humble warehouse, you’ll farm, fish, herd and mine each island to produce goods and amenities for your settlers, whose demands will grow ever more expensive and problematic as they advance to new levels of civilisation and your budding colony becomes a metropolis. Keep your little tribe of pilgrims happy and you can get away with taxing the bejazus out of ‘em whilst building up a rudimentary army (only one type of troop can be recruited), or constructing additional ships to settle/conquer neighbouring islands. Miss a shipment of tea leaves or fail to put dinner on the table and they’ll desert you in droves, sending your revenues into free-fall.

You’ll be doing quite a bit of urban planning during your time in the New World. Each building has an area of influence which dictates where it should be placed: manufacturing facilities need to be built close to the relevant resource and within reach of a market place, while public services such as taverns and bathhouses ought to set up shop in residential areas. Barracks should be built within rifle shot of one another, as troops can only be moved between military buildings. Everything needs to be linked by road and the quality of the road will affect the rate at which goods are accumulated in your warehouses.

Throw all this together with a few environmental hazards, occasional fires, outbreaks of crime and disease and you’ve got a game which will be instantly familiar to players of the antiquated originals (or indeed of similar titles like The Settlers). And herein lies the rub: while it certainly ain’t broke, ANNO 1701 can feel a little too comfortable in its moccasins. Nor are the paltry play options- story campaign, moderately customisable single and multi-player skirmish modes- very inspiring next to the likes of Advance Wars.

But over-familiar though the experience may be, what starts slowly to impress as mud tracks become cobbles, schools shoot up like proverbial wheat and huts explode into townhouses is the elegance with which the whole thing has been translated to Nintendo’s paradigm-busting portable wonder.

Both screens are put through their paces. The bottom screen displays an isometric view of the game world and a sidebar menu with construction, finance, mission-objective and map options, while the top screen houses a summary of your income and expenditure together with an animated portrait of the Advisor, your all-purpose guru and moral compass in the world of ANNO 1701, who beams complacently when you do nice things like defeat the plague and purses his lips when you do less nice things like selling off your settlement’s entire food supply, or accidentally bulldozing the local hospital. Two levels of zoom are available and you can jump to remote locations using the map screen.

The stylus is arguably the first console interface to replicate the ease and intuitiveness of mouse control, and thus a natural fit for a resource-management title. Sunflowers has clearly recognised this, as ninety-nine percent of the game is playable with the stylus alone. Tap on an area of undeveloped land and the top screen will tell you which player owns it and give you a breakdown of its industrial and agricultural potential. Tap on a building to access a radial menu on the bottom screen with options such as upgrade, demolish and duplicate, while the top screen gives you a detailed account of the internal workings, production progress, maintenance costs, troop capacity and so on. Tap on the construction icon to bring up a series of radial menus clam-shelled inside one another, while holding down on the finance icon allows you to choose between trade, taxation, tribute and balance-sheet screens.

Clever touches abound. The camera drifts a little under its own momentum as you whip it from point to point (a mechanic apparently known as ‘soft-stopping’), which not only cuts down on tedious dragging and clicking but also feels rather satisfying in that rose-tinted, momma’s-home-cookin’ way the best Nintendo titles feel satisfying. High praise indeed. Both right and left-handed control schemes are available, for all you freaky mirror-world citizens, and you can also hotkey various actions to the face buttons.

Graphics and visual design were always going to be significant factors given the visually involved nature of the genre on one hand and the DS’s lack of screen real estate on the other, and thankfully ANNO 1701 strikes the right balance between clarity and complexity. The colour palette is bright, cheery and accessible, and while you’ll occasionally struggle to distinguish lumberjacks from stonemasons the buildings are all quite distinctive thanks to good detail and some canny colour-coded roofing. There are a respectable (but not excessive) number of graphical flourishes, from the plumes of smoke which rise from the ore smelter to the ickle sprite workers who wander about herding sheep, pulling wagons and being all industrious, the darlings. The menus are clear and unobtrusive and there’s an option to turn off certain building icons to reduce visual clutter. Smart, smart, smart.

Just a smidgeon of political comment before we slap that score on the end. The campaign storyline (told through text dialogue and hand-drawn stills) is charming enough bar a few nasty bits of Hollywood revisionism. Why hello there, Mr Iroquoi, sir! A small tribute of cloth before we all prosper together in peace and harmony? Why certainly. And because we’re all Technicolor-liberal these days, we won’t contaminate it with smallpox first.

So to sum up: an old game, a game which would feel superficial and out-dated on a home format, but nevertheless a game built around tried-and-true mechanics, given a fresh lease of life by a brilliant conversion to the DS. Sounds good to me. Issue forth, ye gaming diehards! Make the very foundations of HMV shake with the fury of your vengeance!

8/10

Honeycomb Beat is Hudson’s latest DS offering. Fortunately (and somewhat surprisingly), it doesn’t feature a cute bee or even flowers. Instead, the back of the box promises “A madly addictive, music-driven puzzle game featuring 200 unique puzzles to energize your mind!” Let’s have a little background before we go through such an ambitious statement.

The central idea behind Honeycomb Beat is to turn all the tiles in any particular puzzle to a single colour. Every time you tap on one of the hexagonal tiles (known in-game as a beat), it flips over and changes colour. In doing so, it also flips the tiles in contact with it, changing their colour as well. Two gameplay modes are available. The first, Puzzle mode, consists of a pattern of tiles to be flipped, a process which quickly becomes complicated as the scale of the puzzles rises to take in more and more tiles. Little arrows on tiles mean that flipping them will flip entire rows, in the directions indicated by the arrows. Puzzles have a limited amount of beats allowed for completion, meaning that tapping randomly rarely achieves anything. Exceeding this number of beats while completing a puzzle still completes it, but doesn’t count as a total victory. Inevitably, the puzzles can only be completed in the way intended by the designers. There aren’t many that have more than one route to completion, which is disappointing as the challenge feels too linear, and not about discovering the solution on your own. Another gripe with the puzzle mode is that the difficulty spikes from the insultingly easy to the brain-destroyingly frustrating. The learning curve is less than forgiving, though it’s possible that my pathetic brain was merely incapable of grasping the complexities of the puzzles.

The other game mode is the Evolution mode. Basically, tiles scroll up from the bottom of the screen, some flipped some not. Clearing lines causes them to disappear, and if the lines hit the top of the screen it’s game over. This mode doesn’t constrain the player to a tiny number of beats, and instead allows free-reign to clear lines and score points. Completing a level allows access to the next one – which merely moves tiles up the screen faster. Also, on completing a level, players are given brain ratings. Mine were almost consistently “jelly fish”, which was rather hurtful.

So let’s get back to that statement, shall we? The box promised a puzzle game featuring 200 unique puzzles. This is mostly true. The 200 puzzles available are indeed unique, but only technically so. Some are incredibly similar, especially at the lower levels. We were also promised a game that is “maddingly addictive”, again partially true. Initially, the challenge of working through puzzles to unlock new backgrounds and visual effects is enticing, though this soon wears off when the fact that neither are particularly exciting. The claim that the game is “music-driven” is interesting. The implication is that the music will react in some way to your actions in game, a concept that would have elevated this title above the mediocre. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The music simply loops when playing puzzles, and only changes to faster when you approach danger of failure. Saying that the game is therefore music-driven is not describing a new concept – this has been happening in games even since the days of Mario Brothers on the NES. The moving backdrops don’t even appear to react to the music being played, whirling about regardless of whether the music is fast or slow.

Finally, the box also promised me that my mind would be energised. Possibly. However, with the aforementioned number of superior puzzle games available for the DS, the average player would be well-advised to look elsewhere for brain-energising. Honeycomb Beat should be applauded for avoiding the obvious cute puzzle-game trap, and did prove entertaining for about an hour or so, but is otherwise a shallow and curiously soul-less experience.

Plus, all those hexagons brought back nightmares about Blockbuster. Can I have a ‘P’ please, Bob?

5/10

And so it is with high dudgeon that I present Luminous Arc for the DS, a game so mind-numbingly passable I can think of very little to say about it. It’s the latest in a monstrous number of strategy-RPGs to make the leap from armchair gaming to handheld as 2007 draws to a close. It has enough in the way of spiky anime hairdos to puncture a battleship. It has square grid maps, a turn-based battle flow which allots speedy ninja types more turns than tanks, magic, skills, items, a rock-paper-scissors elemental system and a few familiar status effects. It ties everything together adequately with some 2D isometric graphics (presumably aimed at the retro-heads among us) and full touchscreen support. It has a superficial also-ran multiplayer mode. In short, it does absolutely everything required to evade the rubber stamp of rejection whilst doing absolutely nothing to earn the lollypop of ‘recommended purchase’. This game, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason there’s a point on the scale between 5 and 7.

Luminous Arc escapes its own dead-centre mediocrity on exactly two counts. Firstly a lot of the lengthy still cut-scenes are voiced, which would be rather impressive given the meagre DS cartridge capacity if the script and voice-acting weren’t faceclawingly horrendous Saturday morning cartoon bull-droppings. My first ten minutes with the game were immeasurably tougher for it. How I’ve suffered for you, dear readers. Sources close to me report that I emitted plaintive whimpering noises as I was plunged, headphones and all, into the tale of Alph, the Garden Children and the Witches.

But drill past this luxuriant vein of negative potential and Luminous Arc settles well into the role of boring you silly with its sheer, monotonous competence. There is no character customisation to speak of, so it’s pretty much all about winning battles in line with the predictable story arc, which charts the escapades of yet another rag-tag bunch of teenagers as they attempt to Save the World. Far be it for me to spoil any of the ‘twists’, but let’s just say there’s no righteous crusade without a dark, dingy underbelly, and no fresh-faced young orphan without an enigmatic, magical heritage.

The second count in the game’s favour is a question of target demographic. Without the hindrance of an esoteric party development system or the sort of high-falutin’, biorhythmic terrain-modifyin’ nerdery associated with the genre heavyweights, Luminous Arc could be viewed as a pitch to the (studious) kiddies, and can be hesitantly recommended to those looking to abandon what scraps of social aptitude they possess by making their first venture into SRPG-land. If you fall into this latter category, the game is worth considering- providing you can’t get your hands on the GBA’s Final Fantasy Tactics Advance or the recent PSP extravaganza Jeanne D’Arc.

There seems to be little rhyme or reason to the emergence of this, famously niche genre on our sceptred isle. For every Nippon Ichi title to hit the shelves there’s another wonderwork which mysteriously evades detection (not least the original Final Fantasy Tactics) and a half-dozen insipid off-cuts which appear in its stead. I suppose we should be grateful for anything at all, given the great British public’s predilection for chunky men kicking balls or shooting things or, er, hosting quiz shows. Luminous Arc makes tolerable filler material on the SRPG-deprived DS, but any self-respecting anorak will make a beeline for the riches now available on the Sony slab.

6/10

The first port of call is the Tutorial mode to learn the controls. The buttons are used at times, particularly R (to move the cue ball when it is in hand after a foul, or before a break) and L (to fine-tune a shot). The “Impact Cam” is mapped to the Y button, giving you a closer view of where the cue ball is going to impact. This is affected by the spin and power controls, with the dark target circle showing roughly where the cue ball will end up after the shot has been played. Spin is added to a shot by moving the target dot over the onscreen cue ball, and the power meter is easy to drag up and down. Actually taking a shot is done with a “cueing” motion of the stylus, smoothly moving the onscreen cue down and up again to hit the ball. It is also possible to play a practice frame without an opponent to get used to the feel of the controls.

The format of the game has been changed slightly for portable play, with notable absences from the PS2 version reviewed earlier in the year being the Pool and Trickshot games. The main Championship series features eight locations, each requiring the player to win three matches (of one frame each) and then complete a separate Challenge (such as potting several balls in a single shot). For each tournament, the player has three retries, allowing them to try again if they lose. Using all the retries will advance you on to the next event without unlocking anything, with the current season’s progress being saved to the cartridge. Playing through this mode unlocks the challenges, players and venues for use in Friendly mode. Having beaten the Championship, the next task is the World Championship with more matches to conquer.

The menu system is functional and easy to learn, with clear icons and the ability to use either stylus or D-pad and buttons. The commentary by John Virgo can be turned off, leaving some adequate sound effects. Given the limitations of the hardware, the comments are short but do have a lot of character. Occasionally, the commentary does seem at odds with what is happening – a good safety being called a bad miss, since the player failed to pot a ball – but this is rare. On the whole the graphics work well, with the table moving smoothly and some recognisable (if slightly blocky) opponents. These are based on the motion-captured players featured in the console versions, and they can be glimpsed getting ready for a shot or lifting the rest clear after a difficult pot. At times the zoomed out overhead view of the table can make it difficult to recognise the colour of the balls, but this is a minor problem. The different venues are represented by the colour of the carpet and the advertising boards around the edge of the table, a small touch but one that works well. Like the console game, the familiar TV-style scoreboard works well, particularly when it reminds you of how many points are available… and how far behind you are.

Even on the Easy level the computer proves a tough opponent, quickly rattling up a break of 30-40 points that leaves the player in danger of losing the frame. Getting through the Championship will take a fair amount of time and skill, even with the retries available. This initial difficulty may be off-putting for many players, but at least you can still play a quick match against famous players or another human. It is a real shame there is no wireless multiplayer option, which would have elevated this to a higher score. Still, it is a good attempt at creating a portable snooker title, making use of the stylus and tailoring the game to short bursts of play.

7/10