Nintendo DS is a great gaming system for kids aged 7 upwards all the way through to adulthood.  Not only is it simple and fun to use but it also has a very large software library that is jam packed full of all their favourite franchises.  It could be the latest TV show or Movie they’re into or even just one of their day to day hobbies.

Now before we go too far we should avoid any confusion by mentioning that there are two different Nintendo DS’ to choose from.  I recommend kids aged between 5 and 9 years old should preferably be given a Nintendo DS Lite because it has fewer features, this will be simpler for them to use.  Now for your older kiddies (10 years onwards) I recommend a Nintendo DSi which has more extensive features including two cameras for photo taking.  Luckily both models also play the same catalogue of games you’ll find on store shelves in the Nintendo DS section so they can trade games with DS Lite owning friends if they wanted without worry.  There is a fantastic range of colours of the DSi available to choose from including:

• Nintendo DSi Matte Black
• Nintendo DSi Bright Pink
• Nintendo DSi Matte Blue
• Nintendo DSi White

Whilst younger gamers are happy with just playing games, the older ones are going to love the new features of the Nintendo DSi.  So whilst they can continue to play almost every standard DS title on a new Nintendo DSi they can also explore their creative sides.  With two cameras, a microphone and an SD Card slot; the Nintendo DSi is like a portable studio in their pocket.  They’ll be able to take photographs of their surroundings and friends and edit them on the fly with a choice of cool special effects.  These can then be transferred to a PC for printing or sharing online.  Music and sound files can be played, recorded and remixed as it plays using the built in software too.  The Nintendo DSi is a perfect system for them because it will fill their thirst for gaming but could also spark some multimedia creativity.  If your kids are Internet Savvy then they’ll also jump at the chance to use the free Internet Browser, upload photos to Facebook on the Nintendo DSi and even buy pocket money priced games from the Nintendo online store which is similar to the way iTunes users can buy games for the iPhone.

• Read our comprehensive Nintendo DSi review
• How to get Facebook on the Nintendo DSi

Nintendo DS games for older children

Here are some gaming recommendations for your older boy and girl – your early teens Nintendo DS gamers:

• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky is the latest in the Pokemon adventures.  This more mature adventure features a lot of exploring rather than just collecting and battling creatures.
• Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games features both of history’s best loved Video Game mascots together in this sporting adventure title.  Mario and Sonic is packed with genuine winter Olympic events to play as well as an intriguing story mode. You can read our Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for the DS review to find out more.
• The World Ends With You is a side-scrolling adventure beat em up which fuses fast paced action and special moves with interesting music and graphical styles – read our The World Ends With You review for more on this music meets combat game for the Nintendo DS.
• The Legendary Starfy is a popular Japanese Nintendo character who gets his first Western adventure on Nintendo DS.  A unique comic book style platformer that features the world’s most cool Starfish in a sprawling adventure with worlds both underwater and on land.
• Disney’s Wizards of Waverly Place is the game of the hit TV show that is popular with girls across America.  Fans can interact with the legendary Alex Russo by creating spells and other magical activities.
• Lego Indiana Jones 2 continues the block building adventure with this great movie tie in.  Players will play through their favourite Indiana Jones movies with new and alternative retold storylines; they can even build and share levels and join in with a friend for some Coop play. If you’d like to see what the original game looks like we did a video review of Lego Indiana Jones back in June last year.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was this year’s summer block buster movie and now kids can relive the fun by playing the blockbuster DS game.  They’ll love taking control of Harry and friends and using the DS touchscreen and stylus to cast spells and mix potions. For family buying for true Harry Potter fans we also suggest a look at our Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince DS review.
• The Nintendo Points Card is a great way to treat the kids instead of just giving them money for Christmas.  This way they can buy and download their own low priced games via WiFi through the Nintendo DSi instead of having to save up for weeks for a retail game in a store.

Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for Godaddy coupon codes codes – watch the GoDaddy promo codes video for more details, use the CSS free shipping coupon code ‘AFGAMEFS’ for orders over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ to get 15% off orders over $75, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Sadly before my review of Family Game Night has hardly begun, I already have a complaint. It contains just four (yes 4) games. Battleship, Connect 4, Bob It and Operation are all digitally created here for your portable playing pleasure; so will the transfer from the real world to the virtual world suit these classic games? Whilst none of these games made my favourite list I have still enjoyed many a game of Connect 4 and Battleships during my youth; it must be said though that Operation and Bob It have never had the pleasure of my playtime, until now.

I’m sure most of you will have played some or all of these classic games in the past so I won’t spend too much time introducing them to you.

• Battleship is a strategic two player naval war game. Both players secretly position 5 differently sized warships on a large grid which represents the sea. Players then take it in turns to fire a missile to one square in that grid. If they’re very lucky they’ll hit one of their opponent’s ships and can then plan a strategy to sink that ship. More often than not a player will miss and fire a missile ‘harmlessly’ into the sea.
• Connect 4 is of course the simple game we all know and love where your job is to match four of your coloured Chips in a row before the other player. Players take it in turns to place their coin into a vertical grid either to build up a row themselves or try and block their foe.
• Bob It is the most unusual addition to the game because it is in fact a toy as opposed to a board game. It’s a musical toy that asks the player to perform actions on the device (such as pushing a button or twisting a handle) at an ever increasing speed until the player mucks up and does the wrong thing.
• Operation of course is the kids favourite title where players have to remove an awkwardly shaped piece from a game board with tweezers. What makes it fun is the game board is shaped in the form of a hospital patient. Once again players take it turns to remove a piece from his body without catching it on the side and setting off the buzzer, or killing him I suppose.

So how do the games transfer from the physical world to the DS? Well in my opinion it’s a bit 50/50 because I only like two of the games. Connect 4 and Battleship feel absolutely natural on the touchscreen; be it tapping on a grid coordinate to send your missile towards an enemy ship or placing your yellow chip right in the way of an upcoming row of 4 red chips. On the other hand Bob It feels a bit out of place with it getting you to pretend to twist a crank or shout into the DS microphone. Operation on the other hand has been revamped a bit from the original game and actually puts you inside the body with obstructions such as mobile phones stuck inside the guy’s body. The principle is still the same but it feels much more like a Wario Ware mini game that has been dragged out a bit too far.

Now even the craziest of board game fans may feel a little short changed by this display of contents; thankfully EA have out a bit more effort into the production with some neat extras. Firstly you can choose the difficulty of the cpu opponent (if you’re playing on your own) from Normal to Expert. Secondly each game has at least one extra play mode which can at times veer things away from the rules of the original. For example you can play Connect 4 with SuperChips; here you’ll have a much more exciting game against the clock as well as having special powered chips which can affect the gameplay in interesting ways. These include a bomb which will blow up the surrounding chips, a newton chip which pushes the bottom most chip in that column out of the board and a basic but lovely double score chip. Oh and not to forget in this mode you can connect more than 4 chips in a row with successive combos, great!

Aside from all this the most fun you’ll have in Family Game Night on DS is with another player, you can either take it turns on the same DS or if you have another you can share the game using Single Card Download Play or Experience the full game in multiplayer if you own two copies of the game.

Presentationally the game is pretty sweet, all of the games are pretty faithfully recreated in look and feel and the addition of Mr Potato Head of Toy Story fame as host rounds things off nicely. Whilst I didn’t like two of the games I know it’s all down to personal choice so there isn’t anything that negative to say about the game apart from the stingy offering of just four titles.

Hasbro Family Game Night does exactly what it says on the box. It’s a fun recreation of four of their most popular games on the DS and scores a decent 7 out of 10.

Get Hasbro Family Game Night now
New: Buy Hasbro Family Game Night from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Hasbro Family Game Night – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our December 2009 Godaddy.com promo code to save money on web hosting and domains – watch the godaddy discount coupon video for more details, using the CCS discount code valid for December 2009 ‘AFGAMEFS’ will get you free shipping with any order over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ will get you 15% off any order over $75, using the December 2009 Squarespace discount code ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Rubiks World Review for Wii, Rubiks Puzzle World for DS

Tags: Hasbro Family Game Night, Party, Hasbro, EA, Nintendo, DS, Battleship, Connect 4, Bob It, Operation

First up instead of family party based like its Wii relative, Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics on DS is more of a story single player based affair. I suppose the fact that most people take their DS consoles all around the show and play on the go (unlike me) it makes sense for it to be a more solo experience. That isn’t to say there is no multiplayer fun; there is. It is just more of an addition rather than the whole premise and I’ll come to it later on. Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic games is split into three distinct modes; adventure, single player and multiplayer. Adventure is the bulk of the game so let’s start there.

As you’d expect from the title you take control of Mario and Sonic; however it’s not all about Speed Skating and gold medals here. If you’d have thought something as giant and complex as the Winter Olympic Games could go without a hitch then you’re a dummy because if you think about it just for a moment then you’d realise that there is just so much that can go wrong. In this instance though what goes wrong isn’t quite what you or I would have expected. Rather than the typical type of things like Olympic Athletes being struck down by food poisoning or being suspected of drug misuse, in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games things are much worse. Who else but the evil Dr Eggman and Bowser have decided to cause trouble. Instead of kidnapping Princesses or Stealing Chaos Emeralds; this time the nasty duo have concocted a more devious plan. They have kidnapped the special Snow Spirits that create the snow for the Olympic Villages; without them here almost all of the events will be impossible. After all you can’t Ski on grass can you?

So Mario and Sonic jump at the opportunity to save the day and are more than ready to take on the challenge. From here you take control of the two heroes as you explore a series of over world maps taking part in Mission Challenges (Olympic Events) against friends and foes. Every time you win a challenge against a friend such as: Tails, Peach, Knuckles and Donkey Kong. They join your roster and they then become available to compete in the next missions. Each character has differing attributes which may or may not make them suitable for a particular sport. Also every completed event sees you win a magic crystal that the Snow Spirits require to create snow and melt ice; you require five such crystals to unlock the next area. Whilst for the most part you’ll just be walking around looking for the next mission there are a couple of other things to do.

Hidden around if you search well enough are some little extra goodies; firstly you can find extra lives which will come in handy for the harder events, secondly there are scrolls that give you background information on the game characters, and thirdly, you will come across maple leaves which provide insight into actual true facts about the Olympics. As you can probably tell this is a just a fairly loose story mode aimed to make playing through each of the events a little more interesting than just picking one from a list. In a similar fashion to the Nintendo Wii version there are eight Dream Events which are a fun addition; these are similar to the traditional Olympic Games but spice things up with things like Rockets attached to your Skis. Whilst I’d agree all this makes things a bit more exciting I was however a bit disappointed by the quite awfully written dialogue. All of the characters you encounter along the way speak like cartoon characters aimed at Nursery school children, and as a semi-mature 27 year old I was a bit grumped out by being made to feel like a kid in what should be a universal feeling game.

So if you’re tired of adventure you can head into playing the games in a more linear single player experience aimed primarily at beating your best scores or into a triad of party games:-

• Bingo Bash is a basic mini game that gets you to match symbols on a card that correspond to those drawn from a random ball machine, of course on its own that would be dull but surprise balls await which can see you having to take part in a quick Olympic Event against the other players.
• Lucky Spin is another randomizer game which puts the four players up against an Event chosen by starting and stopping a wheel with each of the playable events painted on it. There are some items which switch things up a little but it’s still just a random game machine.
• Wild Card sees you compete in random events once more but this time you collect trading cards. The idea is simple; be the first to get 4 matching cards. What makes this exciting is you need to trade your cards with another player to get a full set; this of course gives them the opportunity to beat you to the punch.

Of course a game like this wouldn’t be much fun on your own and luckily there are some multiplayer options; what I’m sad to report is that you will require two or more Nintendo DS consoles to use the Wireless Single Card or Multi Card download play modes. There is no way to play together on one DS unless you count taking turns in the single player games. If you’ve got a friend with a DS you will no doubt have some fun because playing with a friend is always much more fun than playing with CPU bots.

Overall I did enjoy Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter games for DS; it’s a nice looking title and actually pushes the graphical capabilities of the system more than its bigger Wii brother does. All of the games are very fun to play and you can control most of them via the stylus very easily; a few do require DPad and Button controls and they’re fine too. Because this version seems aimed at younger gamers for no real apparent reason, it does mean that it is much easier than I’d like; having a selectable difficulty mode for advanced players would have been a nice option. But in the end it’s still fun to play through regardless of its simplicity.

A title from Sega and Nintendo combined isn’t likely to ever be of poor quality and once again they come up trumps with a quality title. By no means is it perfect but in a world of very rushed shovelware it’s nice to see that a game like this isn’t just rushed out to earn a quick buck when so many other license games are. A solid but slightly lacking 6 out of 10.

Get Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for the DS now
New: Buy Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for the DS from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for the DS – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our December 2009 Godaddy coupons to save money on hosting and web domains – watch our GoDaddy coupon code video for more details, using the December 2009 CCS coupon code valid for December 2009 ‘AFGAME15′ gets you 15% off orders over $75 and ‘AFGAMEFS’ will get you free shipping on orders over $30, use our December 2009 Square Space coupon code ‘WEASEL’ at the checkout to get 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: video review of Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games Wii version review

Tags: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for the DS, Nintendo DS, Sega, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, DS version, DS, Mario, Sonic, Olympic Winter Games, Party, Olympics

Mario and Sonic’s Olympic Games game if you know what I mean sold like the proverbial hot cakes. Not only did it tap into the spirit of the Olympics but it also brought together two gaming greats as they competed along with their friends and enemies over track and field events – see what we thought of that back in our Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games review. Now they’re back competing over snow and ice but does the game get a chilly reception?

Well, the good news is that this game improves on the last one. You’ll notice straight away that all the events are unlocked from the start which is great news in terms of accessibility. The controls are also tighter and seem less random but this does mean that sometimes gameplay can be a bit too simplistic.

Events vary from figure skating and speed skating to ice hockey, curling and of course racing events as you hurtle down slopes and tunnels on skis, snowboards or even in bobsleighs. Of course, this one’s aimed very much at party play for the casual gamer so expect this to appeal more to non-gamers than the hardcore.

Once again, Sega have tried to implement gestures that fit as closely to the real thing. When curling you ‘brush’ the stone towards the target just like in the real game and when speed skating you thrust your arms to-and-fro to get your speed up. You can even use the Wii balance Board if you have one to distribute your weight left and right in the slalom or lie face down on the floor when doing the skeleton. You’ll need some space in your lounge to do this and it may prove just a little bit too much effort for your Nan, best she just uses the remote then.

On a negative note, it’s a shame there isn’t any Wii Motion plus support. Sega say it’s because they want the game to appeal to as many Wii owners as possible and that’s fair enough, but it would be nice to also support the thousands of gamers who’ve got the peripheral and can only currently use it on a couple of titles.

This game isn’t aimed at the likes of me but I know that families who own a Wii just for party games and the like will enjoy this one. It’s not my cup of tea but if you’re in the casual games camp then you’ll be pleased to know I’m giving it a very good 7 out of 10.

Get Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games now
New: Buy Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy coupon codes for November 2009 to save money on hosting and web domains – watch our GoDaddy coupon video for more details, using the CCS discount code valid for November 2009 ‘AFGAMEFS’ will get you free shipping with any order over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ will get you 15% off any order over $75, use our November 2009 Square Space coupon code ‘WEASEL’ at the checkout to get 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games review, Beijing Olympics video game review, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games review

Tags: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, Wii, Mario and Sonic, Olympic Winter Games, Mario, Sonic, vancouver, DS, Nintendo, Winter Olympics

I had my first experience of 3D cinema the other day when I watched Up. Once my eyes had adjusted I was initially impressed but then I sort of got used to it. It’s the same with videogames. Next-gen machines come out and everyone goes ‘whooo’ but then the bar has to constantly be raised in order to impress. It’s a pity then that not only does Up have average graphics, but it’s also a very average platform game that’s of little interest to me.

You mainly play the game as Carl and Russell as you move round the 3D platform levels attached to your floating house. Similar to the Lego games, you can play with a friend and must work together to get round the environment. For example, Russell can shimmy along ledges and use Kevin the bird to reach new heights, while Carl can use his cane to climb up ledges and keep wasps and spiders away with the screeching of his faulty hearing aid. In single player mode you hit a button so switch between them which sometimes works and can sometimes be frustrating when the AI takes over and moves characters precisely where you don’t want them.

Most of the time you’re just platforming and collecting coins and artefacts as you go. Combat is extremely limited to swinging your cane at things or picking up items to use against the inhabitants of the forest. Occasionally you also get a boss fight but the action throughout is all rather slow and cumbersome. What do you expect from controlling a geriatric and a boy scout?

To break things up a bit you can also take to the skies and literally dogfight with the talking dogs. For some reason this is also the first thing you do in the game which is odd as it’s set in a scene right near the end of the movie.

Young children may enjoy playing as the characters from the film but this doesn’t offer anything for the older gamer. It’s an average platform game so it gets an average score of 5 out of 10.

Get Up now and get Up
New: Buy Up videogame from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Up – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy promo code for November 2009 to save money on web hosting and domains – watch the GoDaddy coupon code video for more details, using the CCS discount code valid for November 2009 ‘AFGAMEFS’ will get you free shipping with any order over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ will get you 15% off any order over $75, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: G Force review, Wii Christmas party games, Youtube Up review

Tags: Up, Up, disney, pixar, THQ, platformer, Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PSP, DS, Mac OS X, Windows, Single player, 2 player, co-op, multiplayer, Youtube Up review

Buy a Nintendo DS now
New: Buy a Nintendo DS from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy promo code for November 2009 to save money on web hosting and domains – watch our godaddy discount coupon video for more details, using the CCS discount code valid for November 2009 ‘AFGAMEFS’ will get you free shipping with any order over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ will get you 15% off any order over $75, using the Squarespace discount code valid for November 2009 ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Nintendo DSi review, Nintendo DS Lite Limited Edition

Tags: Nintendo DS, 3G, Internet

Charles Martinet recently joined us for a chat and explains what it’s like to be the voice behind the oldest and most recognisable video game character of all time – Mario. He’s also behind a whole host of other Nintendo characters who’ll be appearing in the forthcoming New Super Mario Bros for the Wii which we’ll be reviewing soon, make sure you order your copy in time for holiday season for what’s sure to be a Christmas hit for all the family.

Preorder New Super Mario Bros now
New: Buy New Super Mario Bros from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our Gamesweasel Godaddy coupon codes to save money on web domains and hosting – watch our GoDaddy discount code video for more details, use the CCS discount code ‘AFGAMEFS’ to get free shipping on orders over $30 and ‘AFGAME15′ for 15% off orders over $75, use the Squarespace coupon code ‘WEASEL’ to get 12% off for the lifetime of your account.

Related: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games review, Mario Kart review

Tags: Mario, Charles Martinet, New Super Mario Bros, interview, Wii, Nintendo, DS

Once again it’s time for another EA Sports game with a new number on the end. This time it’s the turn of FIFA. When you first look at the game it doesn’t look much different but you’ll soon realise that they’ve ironed out all the things that made 09 great to make this version excellent.

First of all there’s the 360’ movement, meaning you’re no longer running at 45 degree angles. This makes for a more realistic movement of the players and coupled with the improved ball physics, some truly interesting and freakish goals that are sure to make you shout out or hold your head in your hands.

Manager Mode is the main season mode where you play through a number of seasons and make transfer and squad decisions. Be a Pro mode is back where you play as an individual and now you can make your own Virtual Pro. Using EA’s Game Face technology which is currently broken as I review the game due to high demand, you can put your face right into the game and level them up RPG style in custom games and even in the arena.

Following on from the Adidas Live Season comes Live Season 2.0 where you can download the latest games your club’s played and try to replicate or re-write history. It’s a shame you have to pay for this after a 5 game demo but hardcore fans will find it worth the extra spend. There’s also a set piece creator where you can modify and save set pieces for use in games. Again, only the hardcore will probably go this deep into the game but it’s a nice touch.

As ever, presentation is slick with some great player likenesses and some good ad-libbing from Martin Tyler and Andy Gray. I usually say not to bother getting the new version of an EA Sports game if you’re enjoying last year’s, but once again, FIFA’s come up trumps. Over to you Pro Evo. FIFA 10 gets 9 out of 10, if you know what I mean.

Get FIFA 10 now
New: Buy FIFA 10 from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent FIFA 10 – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our November 2009 Godaddy coupons to save money on hosting and web domains – watch our godaddy discount coupon video for more details, using the November 2009 CCS coupon code valid for November 2009 ‘AFGAME15′ gets you 15% off orders over $75 and ‘AFGAMEFS’ will get you free shipping on orders over $30, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Fifa 09 review, Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 review, FIFA 10 review

Tags: FIFA 10, FIFA, football, soccer, FIFA Soccer 10, EA Sports, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, DS, PC

Buy Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver now
New: Buy Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our October 2009 Godaddy coupons to save money on hosting and web domains, use the Squarespace coupon code ‘WEASEL’ to get 12% off for the lifetime of your account.

Related: Pokemon Diamond Pearl review, Nintendo DS Lite Limited Edition Pokemon Pack

Tags: Pokémon, HeartGold, SoulSilver, sales figures, Pokemon HeartGold, Pokemon SoulSilver

Buy English Training for the DS now
New: Buy English Training for the DS from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our Gamesweasel October 2009 Godaddy coupon to save money on web domains and hosting, using the October 2009 Squarespace discount code ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Subbuteo review, Fernando Torres

Tags: English Training, DS, Fernando Torres

For a couple of weeks I was waiting for a fun little title to play on my DSi in bed and I was quite pleased when Build-A-Lot arrived for review. So the aim of the game is to progress from being a newbie property developer to America’s greatest (and richest) property tycoon. On the offset I agree that a property building game doesn’t sound that much fun; that’s because being a real property developer is quite a horrid prospect for most people. What you have to remember is that this is a game and as such, it’s been designed with fun in mind with nothing to bog you down. From the start Build-A-Lot throws you into the action rather than get you doing any of the boring stuff like searching for land, getting it surveyed and dealing with all the legal bullplop.

Meadow Dale is the first neighbourhood which acts as your tutorial; the Mayor gives you three missions that teach you the basics to the game. One of your first jobs is to build a rambler (a small family home) and that is as simple as clicking on one of the pieces of land that you own and clicking build house.

With another 7 neighbourhoods to play through (each with a more demanding Mayor than the last) you’d expect the game to steadily increase in difficulty and complexity. Materials become a critical factor, you can’t build houses or buildings without them and your initial budget is usually quite low, this doesn’t give you the option to buy in bulk which saves money. The only way to make money is by selling or renting your houses. Renting will provide more income long term whilst selling can get you a large sum quickly. Here it’s time for you to plan a strategy so that you can afford to progress. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes you will not know if you’ve made the right decision until a few minutes later (i.e. when you running out of time to complete the mission). You’ll also need to build workshops to train builders and even deal with the tax man when he comes knocking for his share of your profits. The surprising thing is that even with more and more tasks to complete per mission as you progress, the game is stays fun. This is because Build-A-Lot cleverly evolves from a simple ‘tap here and build stuff game’, to an intriguing yet taxing micromanagement fest. This is something not really gathered that easily from the description on the box which made it a really nice surprise. It’s like going out with a good looking babe and finding out she has brains too, excellent.

Build-A-Lot is presented with nothing flash or fancy to get in the way of solid gameplay. Graphically it’s basic and doesn’t push the DS to its 3D limits in the slightest; this is purely a 2D top down perspective game with some pretty hand drawn art and a smidgen of animation here and there for good measure. The music and sound effects can and do get a little irritating; especially the constant sound of your builders at work. Luckily Build-A-Lot is one of those games that do not require sound, ideal for those times at a public library whilst your geeky friends read books.

It’s hard to categorize Build-A-Lot. It falls right in-between thoughtful strategy games such as Civilization and frantic strategy games like Diner Dash. You could say it has the brains of the former but the excitement of the latter.

I really enjoyed Build-A-Lot because it offered a good challenge without a crazy difficulty curve or some never ending style of gameplay. There are lots of things to do in the game without there being too many menus and icons scattered about the place, everything is straightforward and logical and that’s how I like it. There is no multiplayer mode or any online aspect to the game at all so if you’re only looking for a game to play with your friends then this isn’t for you. I don’t describe Build-A-Lot as a lonely experience because it’s sometimes nice to have a game which you can play on your own and in your own way. I spent about two weeks wanting to head to bed early just to play a couple of missions before I went to sleep, if only I could review Wii, 360 and PS3 games in bed too. As a bonus to the main game there is also a casual game mode which does away with the time limit and frantic action; here you can take as long as you like to turn the empty town into a neighbourhood the beautiful people will want to live in. You’ll still need to plan ahead but things aren’t quite as stressful as the main game.

Build-A-Lot for DS is a budget title that packs a premium punch. No it’s not a simple game for the kiddies but a game for the grownups who don’t mind their head hurting in a good way. I award it a rather good 8 out of 10.

Get Build A Lot now
New: Buy Build A Lot from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Build A Lot – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy promo code for October 2009 to save money on web hosting and domains, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Henry Hatsworth Review, Professor Layton and the Curious Village review

Tags: Build A Lot, Build-A-Lot, DS, Strategy, Puzzle, Property, Building, Nintendo DS

Anyway, I digress – you don’t want to hear about my shopping woes, do you, you want to hear about the sequel to one of the biggest Nintendo DS games of last year, right? Well, after unlocking the mysteries of the Curious Village and its unusual inhabitants back in 2008, Professor Layton, along with his plucky sidekick Luke, are now in England on the trail of a mysterious box. Well… it’s ‘mysterious’ to them – for the player there’s a small clue as to what the box might be in the title of the game! Called Professor Layton And The Diabolical Box in the US, for the UK market the game has been renamed Professor Layton And Pandora’s Box, a title that very possibly spoils one of the game’s big plot-twists. Title aside though, the gameplay is unchanged from the US version.

Our story begins with the Professor and Luke receiving a letter from one of Layton’s friends, an academic called Dr Andrew Schrader who states that he has got his hands on a strange antique called the ‘Elysian Box’, an item which is reputed to have killed everyone who has ever opened it! Dr Schrader ends his letter by saying that he was originally intending to not to open the Elysian Box until he had fully researched it, but then just decided ‘to open it anyway’. Which is basically the equivalent of a bomb disposal expert saying ‘I WAS going to check the manual to see which wire to cut’, but then I just thought ‘what the heck, let’s cut all of them!’’ Needless to say, the Professor’s friend doesn’t last long, and no sooner has he popped his clogs than Layton and Luke are setting out to solve the mystery of how Dr Schrader died, and what happened to the box, which has vanished from Schrader’s apartment.

Storyline aside, players of the first game will feel very much at home here. As with the first title, you must guide the Professor and Luke through the twists and turns of the story by using the stylus and touch screen to explore and examine the different environments. Tapping on different objects on the screen often brings up comments and observations from the Professor or Luke, uncovers hidden ‘Hint coins’, and – most importantly – opens up puzzles. These puzzles are essentially the backbone of the game, and come in a variety of forms, some mathematics problems, some logic puzzles, some ‘physical’ tests where you must use the stylus to manipulate objects on screen in some way. Some of these puzzles must be solved in order for you to progress through the game, some give you bonuses if you complete them, and some are there just for fun, and they range in difficulty from fairly easy to actually quite taxing. As before, should a puzzle prove a little tough, then up to three Hint coins can be used to purchase tips on how to solve the puzzle.

The puzzle segment itself has been slightly tweaked since the last game – as before you’re given a written explanation of the task at hand on the top screen (which it is essential to read carefully as often the clue is written in such a way as to deliberately mislead anyone who’s not fully paying attention) but what’s new for the sequel is the ‘Memo’ option. Clicking this button drops what amounts to a piece of digital tracing paper over the top of the puzzle, so you can still see it, but you can then scribble notes, do calculations, and generally figure things out before selecting your answer. In the previous game some of the puzzles offered an option a bit like this, but others didn’t, forcing you to do all the working out in your head, so the Memo option is definitely a welcome addition, and shows that even though Professor Layton And The Curious Village was a first-class game, the developers have still been looking for ways of improving upon it.

There are a few other small differences between this game and the first (like the Hamster minigame for example, where you must collect objects as you explore and then place them on a chess board in such a way that a fat hamster gets some exercise – actually as weird as it sounds, but no less enjoyable for it) but in the main the basic gameplay is more-or-less the same. This means that if you liked the last game, then you’re going to like this. It also means, however, that if you DIDN’T enjoy the last title, then there’s probably not a lot to excite you here.

That said – what’s not to like? I guess if I had to be really picky, then I could probably dig up a couple of criticisms… there’s Luke’s accent for example. He’d clearly NOT played by a ‘real boy’, but is instead voiced by an adult, most likely a woman ‘doing’ a child’s voice. And apparently the voice actor is someone who went to the Dick Van Dyke school of English accents, seeing as Luke’s switches from plummy, upper-class toff to ‘cock-er-ney’ street urchin mid-sentence. I personally used to find this highly irritating, but after a while it actually becomes quite amusing and in years to come will no doubt become a recognisable quirk of this game series much like the REALLY bad character acting did in the very first Resident Evil game.

Aside from that, the best I can do for negativity is to say that very occasionally the odd puzzle isn’t quite on a par with all the others. This can be for various reasons – there’s one where you have to study a painted scene for example, and the tiny detail of the painting is difficult to make out on the small DS screen (plus there’s no zoom option) which makes figuring the puzzle out more tricky than it should be. There are others where the ‘logic’ involved in figuring out the solution is not so much unbiased fact as the ‘opinion’ of the puzzle designer. Or to put it another way, the solution to the puzzle assumes facts that are not in evidence. For instance: you’ve got a fat guy and a thin guy, and the assumption (apparently) is that the fat guy eats faster than the thin guy, but this isn’t given as one of the facts of the clue, the puzzle-setter just assumes that this is a given (this isn’t one of the actual puzzles, just an example of the type of the slightly faulty logic that you sometimes come across).

On the whole though, the logic and presentation of the puzzles is impeccable, and considering the number of different challenges that the game throws at you (more than 150 in total), the fact that there are only one or two duff ones should really be applauded.

And, the odd ever-so-slightly ‘iffy’ puzzle aside, this game definitely builds on the previous one – it doesn’t fix what wasn’t broken, it adds a few clever new innovations, but it essentially just offers a lot more of the same, and it comes out on top because of it. Extra bonuses include being able to uncover codes in Pandora’s Box which unlock extra content in the Curious Village (and vice-versa) and you can bet that this is NOT the last we’re going to see of the Professor and his assistant either, because this game also has a special hidden section which can only be unlocked by playing the NEXT game in the series, so no prizes for guessing what Nintendo DS owners will be asking for come Christmas 2010!

All in all, Professor Layton And Pandora’s Box is a joy to play, will amuse all ages and sexes, both young and old, and will keep you puzzling for many, many happy hours to come. As such, it gets an almost perfect 9 out of 10.

Get Professor Layton And Pandoras Box now
New: Buy Professor Layton And Pandoras Box from Amazon.com
Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for October 2009 Godaddy discount codes, use the Squarespace coupon code ‘WEASEL’ to get 12% off for the lifetime of your account.

Related: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box UK release date, Review of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

Tags: Professor Layton And Pandoras Box, Professor Layton, Pandoras Box, Diabolical Box

Buy an iPod Touch  now
New: Buy an iPod Touch from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our September 2009 Godaddy.com promo code to save money on web hosting and domains, using the Squarespace discount code valid for September 2009 ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: »iPod Touch fire hazard, Sonic The Hedgehog iPod version

Tags: iPhone, iPod, DS, PSP, Phile Schiller, Apple

Fans of the series will be pleased to hear that there are 2 further games in the series of DS puzzle games – Professor Layton and the Last Time Travel which is already out in Japan but awaiting development to English. Professor Layton and the Specters Flute is actually set 3 years prior to the Curious Village and deals with how the Professor and Luke met, this title is due for release late November 2009 in Japan with no word on a US or UK release yet.

Buy Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box now
New: Buy Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our Godaddy coupon codes for September 2009 to save money on hosting and web domains, using the September 2009 Squarespace discount code ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: review of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Tags: Professor Layton, Diabolical Box, Professor Layton and Pandoras Box, Nintendo, DS, Professor Layton and the Last Time Travel, Professor Layton and the Specters Flute

I’ve been waiting almost a year to go on another puzzling adventure with Professor Layton and his trusty sidekick Luke and I couldn’t wait until it came out here in the UK so I’ve imported the US version. Once again I’m having a thoroughly good time and that’s thanks to the same great gameplay as the first game Professor Layton and the Curious Village. This time, one of the Professor’s friends has apparently been killed after opening a mysterious wooden box, and they set off to find out what happened. During the course of the game they uncover many more mysteries and of course over 150 puzzles to solve.

These range from sliding puzzles, to riddles, to interactive puzzles where you must move and manipulate items. There are also observation puzzles where you need a keen eye – tricky on such a small screen. To add a bit more variety there’s also a pet hamster to look after. Treat him well and exercise him via a mini game and you get a nice surprise.

Once again the visuals and whole presentation are cartoony yet interesting and there’s more dialogue this time. It can jar a bit when suddenly the dialogue is replaced by just text but there isn’t all that much room in a DS card so developers Level 5 are forgiven.

If you loved the first game as much as I did you’d be a fool not to get on this right away. It’s more of the same and as the old saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I can’t put it down, so Professor Layton’s latest adventure gets an almost perfect 9 out of 10.

Get Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box now
New: Buy Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our Gamesweasel September 2009 Godaddy coupon to save money on web domains and hosting, using the September 2009 Squarespace discount code ‘WEASEL’ at checkout will get you 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Mystery Case Files Millionheir review, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box review

Tags: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, Professor Layton and Pandoras Box, puzzles, Nintendo, DS, Professor Layton, Diabolical Box, Pandoras Box, puzzle game

If you believed the box then the game of the film of the book follows the story from beginning to end letting you step into Harry’s emotionless shoes to experience it first-hand. Well in reality it hops in and out of it with glee occasionally doing a bit of a jig around the major plot points. If you haven’t read or watched Half-Blood Prince lately, you might struggle following the plot. The game presumes you are familiar with the structure of the tale and throws you from scenes and locations without any explanation as to what you’re actually doing. Still, this is refreshing to players well-versed in Potter lore who don’t need spoon-feeding. Even for me, the rushing around between each locale was only mildly jarring, and I haven’t read the book for years.

The game is definitely a treat for the senses. While the sprites are typical fuzzy N64-looking DS fare the backgrounds are lush and detailed. The soundtrack is good enough to whisk you away into the series’ world of wonder too.

The Harry Potter world is rich with its own mythology and culture, and the game developers have populated their digital world with as much material from the books as they could manage. All the characters are here; the games, the spells. To say it’s loyal to its source material will be like saying Ronald McDonald is loyal to burgers.

The Half-Blood Prince is an isometric sandbox adventure which charges the player with being skilful at its many mini-games and collecting stuff scattered around Hogwarts. Sadly, a lot of the gameplay does come from running about picking up certain items and trading them with people for more useful items. Exactly the same thing happened in Link’s Awakening on the Gameboy but the difference is that you didn’t notice. In Harry Potter’s game this rather stilted approach stands out like a thumb that looks like Jethro Tull. While the ‘run here, swap marbles for book, run here, use book in mini-game’ approach will probably work wonders for kids, an adult might look down his nose at the rather elementary approach.

To its credit, like Canis Canem Edit, Harry’s wanderings around school are broken up by some curricular, extra-curricular and not-so-curricular activities, represented by a variety of sweet little games.

Quidditch - the game with brooms ‘n’ balls – is represented so badly that it made me feel for people like my grandfather who played Quidditch with the Germans on Christmas Day in the trenches. Still there are card and marble games that are fun if terribly easy and a magical duel system that takes the form of a 2D one-on-one beat ‘em up. Match your opponent’s moves with counter-spells if you can keep up. Plus, there are the lessons. By far the most challenging of these is Potions which requires some decent reflexes and timing. I was getting cocky with the mini-games by then so it shocked me so much when I didn’t win first time.

If you’re a Harry Potter fan exploring Harry’s world is going to be like opening up a treasure chest. The characters are all there, the music is warm and inviting, and being in the school will feel like a treat. While the gameplay might strike a few blows against originality and competitive difficulty, this is made up by the massive sense of immersion the game provides. I’m not a child, regardless of how many children’s books I read so I can’t speak for them, but I imagine this game would be a joy for younger, less experienced players.

The story is of a decent length and the mini-games will add a couple of hours of extra play, so if your children need something to lose themselves in after they’ve read the book nine times and the film fourteen, go and treat them to this.

Harry Potter’s latest gets an enjoyable 7 out of 10.

Get Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for the DS now
New: Buy Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for the DS from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for the DS – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for September 2009 Godaddy discount codes, use our September 2009 Square Space coupon code ‘WEASEL’ at the checkout to get 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince video review, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince release date

Tags: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince for the DS, Harry Potter, Half Blood Prince, Nintendo DS

Anyone old enough to remember the G.I. Joe cartoon and toys? Well if you do, you may or may not be excited about the new movie. This is the game of the movie of the cartoon and as you’d expect it’s actually a load of watered-down rubbish so I’ll be quick.

As you can see, the game almost plays like Commando or Contra in that you just run into the screen and shoot everything in front of you. This wouldn’t be so bad if the game played like Gears of War but it actually plays a bit like the 80s game Commando which of course is unacceptable. You can play alone or co-op and if you’re playing single player you can swap between characters mid-level, however, they skate around the environment like the 3rd person mode in Fallout 3 and the cover system isn’t worth using at all. So, you just end up strafing all over the place and shooting stuff. And if you do have to backtrack, the camera doesn’t move so you run blindly into the edge of the screen.

Character models are shoddy, environments are boring and the whole game feels like something you should download from the Xbox Live Arcade. If you want some good run and gun action instead, pick up Gears of War 2 – it should be pretty cheap now. G.I. Joe gets an awful 2 out of 10.

Get GI Joe The Rise of Cobra now
New: Buy GI Joe The Rise of Cobra from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent GI Joe The Rise of Cobra – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Use our August 2009 Godaddy coupons to save money on hosting and web domains, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Gears of War 2, Bionic Commando review, GI Joe The Rise of Cobra review

Tags: GI Joe The Rise of Cobra, GI Joe, Rise of Cobra, G.I.Joe

We all know that most movie licenses are very bad but Disney’s G-Force actually bucks the trend and delivers a satisfying action adventure with high production values and tight controls. In the game you play as Darwin, one of the G-Force team, as you try to put a stop to electrical appliances that have come alive thanks to a virus.

In a change from the swine flu stories in the news at the moment, this time a virus is making irons, microwaves, toasters, shavers and headphones come alive and start attacking humans. Of course it’s far-fetched but these appliances provide suitably-sized opponents for your little guinea pig to fight with. Darwin has a plasma gun which can be upgraded, a quick-fire blaster rifle and a saber whip for melee combat. You’ll also have to employ some strategy with some of the appliances as some of them only show their weak spots at certain times or need to be destroyed in some other cunning way.

You also have the help of your housefly friend Mooch who you can control to squeeze through grates and slow down time to make it past fans and lasers to open doors and hack security for you. It’s really fun flying around the rooms and finding a way to get Darwin further into his mission.

Of course, the game’s very linear as you’d expect from a title like this and unfortunately there’s not too much variety in the game. Apart from a couple of levels when you’re in your hamster ball vehicle, all the environments look very samey and drab and most of your enemies can be killed by moving and shooting until they explode. Still, in short doses this game is great fun to play with high production values and responsive controls.

The game also comes with 3D glasses and you can switch this mode on in the options. To be honest though, I wouldn’t bother. The game doesn’t look much more 3D than it does in normal mode, everything looks washed out and it gave me a headache. Disney G-Force gets a very good 7 out of 10.

Get G-Force now
New: Buy G-Force from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent G-Force – free rental trial from Gamefly.com
Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for August 2009 Godaddy discount codes, use the Squarespace coupon code ‘WEASEL’ to get 12% off for the lifetime of your account.

Related: Lego Indiana Jones review, The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian review, Youtube G-Force review

Tags: G-Force, GForce, g force, Darwin, Disney, guinea pig, hamster, Mooch, PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii, PlayStation Portable, PSP, iPhone OS, G-Force review

Buy a Nintendo DSi now
New: Buy a Nintendo DSi from Amazon.com
Offers: Use our September 2009 Godaddy.com promo code to save money on web hosting and domains, use our September 2009 Square Space coupon code ‘WEASEL’ at the checkout to get 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Nintendo DSi review, DSi region unlocked

Tags: Nintendo, DSi, Facebook, DSi Facebook

Before I go into my review of Moon for DS I’ll ask you a question. How would we respond to a stronger and more intelligent alien species that saw humans as an expendable resource just as we currently do with nearly every other animal species on Earth? After all, the reasoning for Man’s behaviour has always been along the lines of being top of the food chain or being the most intelligent species. So what if some other species comes along who become the food chain leaders, would we have to fold over in a mound of our own logic and let them do what they like or fight back? Well it wouldn’t be much of a game if we just folded over so it’s safe to assume that we’ll be fighting back.

You take control of super solider; Major Edward Kane whose team is sent to investigate a hatchway found on the Moon’s surface. Not long after arriving on the Moon’s surface some heavy stuff goes down, the Moon base comes under attack by unidentified vessels and the rest of Alpha team have disappeared. General Lambert quickly comes onto the radio and tells you to get your ass down that hatch to investigate, so what do you do? Jump in the Moon buggy lovingly nicknamed Lola and drive to the hatch pronto. Lola comes into play in later missions too and let it be said, driving a moon buggy with a laser gun is always a pleasure.

After a short ride down a green elevator you’re suddenly all alone in an alien base under the Moon’s surface. Sure you have radio contact with your Technical Officer Tsuke and the hard hitting General Lambert but they’re not much use to you against the robotic defence droids flying about, here is where your Super Assault Rifle comes in. This SAR heavy duty weapon needs no ammunition and has a high rate of fire. It’s probably one of Earth’s most powerful hand weapons but is it powerful enough to defend yourself against Moon aliens with? Well the simple answer is, no not really. Luckily for you though you’ll be able to find more powerful Alien weapons throughout your journey in Moon, however these will require ammo top ups which are sometimes dropped when you defeat a baddie, you’ll also pick up health in this way too. If you’re familiar with the Metroid Prime series then I think you’ll be quite happy here inside Moon, for the most part you’ll be heading to locations marked on your map to find keys or disable power supplies to bring down force fields. Computer terminals scattered along the route slowly provide you with data records and diary entries which fill you in with what’s been going on here and why these aliens are so interested in humans. These entries are really well written and tell three different stories, each of which will chill your spine in a different way, but I don’t want to spoil them for you. Another similarity to Metroid Prime is the inclusion of access tunnels which Kane is too big to enter; instead of morphing into a ball like Samus; Kane carries a remote control droid which can be sent through to access switches and reach previously inaccessible areas. If you happen to search these tunnels quite thoroughly you’ll also find Alien Computer Artefacts which Tsuke can use to create Virtual Reality style training missions for you to practice your skills on, you can find three artefacts on almost every level.

For the most part you will just be walking through corridors shooting baddies and trying to reach the next save station before you run out of health. Sadly outside of item finding there isn’t much puzzle solving to be had and the onscreen map will prevent you from getting lost. Fortunately there are usually more than enough enemies to keep you occupied, none of them are too difficult to defeat on their own but in mixed groups they can amount to a challenge. For me playing though to complete the story was the main catch. Fans of Renegade Kid’s previous FPS on DS (Dementium) will be joyous to hear that the control scheme is almost identical. Directional movements controlled with the DPad and aiming via the stylus and touchscreen, just tap the left shoulder button to fire. Access your weapon select screen are just a tap away. Lefties never fear, you can swap the controls to the opposite side and play just as comfortably as a right hander.

Overall I really enjoyed Moon and found the storyline rather gripping and really recommend anyone who likes a bit of intrigue and Sci-Fi to take a look. Graphically Moon is a little bland and the environments hardly change from area to area apart from the walls changing colour. Things do to tend to look more slightly more industrial as you head through the game but variation is quite limited. The saving grace for the lack of detail is probably the super smooth framerate which hardly dips even when lots of enemies and weapons fire are all flying about. The only downside to the game really is the lack of multiplayer modes to be found, no online or offline play at all. Hopefully they’ll consider an online coop if a sequel is in the works.

If I had to choose one FPS title for DS then I’d actually recommend horror title Dementium first because it’s a little more varied and probably is more original but Moon is a close second with its more rigid Metroid Prime meets Quake 2 gameplay. 7 out of 10.

Get Moon now
New: Buy Moon from Amazon.com
Offers: Visit the Gamesweasel offers page for August 2009 Godaddy discount codes, use the Squarespace coupon ‘WEASEL’ for 12% off the lifetime of your account.

Related: Dementium, Metroid Prime

Tags: Moon, Moon, FPS, Dementium, shooter, Nintendo DS, DS

Get the Gamesweasel video show now for free!

3 years ago I saw a rather good looking Indiana Jones game which had some dynamic fighting using their new Euphoria engine. So far, that game hasn’t surfaced and what we get instead is this latest adventure on the Wii, Staff of Kings. This time Indy is looking for the Staff of Moses and once again has to fight thugs, Nazis and mystical forces along the way.

Being on the Wii, LucasArts have decided to eek out every last bit of motion control. You use the remote and nunchuck to punch with your left and right fist, and by holding down the B button and swinging the remote, you can unleash your whip to disarm enemies, pull them closer for a handy headbutt or swing around the environment. You even get to use it as a joystick as you fly a plane and as a light gun during shooting sections.

Although it’s quite novel using the controls in this way to fight at first, it soon gets a bit frustrating. You can’t always pull off the moves you mean to do, not that that matters because your enemies mostly wait around for you to hit them or dodge their attacks. The fighting is fun though as you pick up objects and smash them into tables, fish tanks etc and does feel quite meaty as Indy’s punch-ups often look in the movies.

Unfortunately the game’s also very glitchy and feels rushed and unfinished. Tutorial sections and cut-scenes can’t be skipped so if you happen to die during them ,you have to sit through long sequences before you can try again. Although the Indy sound-alike is very good, audio skips and jumps as the game loads new areas, and even animations jump and skip as you fight and move around.

There’s also a co-op multiplayer mode in there if you fancy it as Indy and his Sean Connery Dad run about together but to be honest, this is pretty throw away too.

It’s a shame I enjoyed the old graphic adventure Fate of Atlantis and the PS2 game Emperor’s Tomb more than this one. It may be better on the PSP and PS2 thanks to a less convoluted control system but if you want a tomb-raiding action adventure, get the recent Tomb Raider instead. Staff of Kings gets an average 5 out of 10.

Get Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings now
New: Buy Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Lego Indiana Jones review, Tomb Raider Underworld, Youtube Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings review

Tags: Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, Indiana Jones, LucasArts, Wii, PS2, PSP, Tomb Raider, Youtube Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings review

Hudson has sent us some screenshots of their new puzzle game Sudoku 150! For Challengers which is one of the first Sudoku games to be released via the new DSiWare service. Whilst there are already a number of Sudoku games available for the DS, Sudoku 150! For Challengers has very nice presentation and comes at a low 500 Nintendo Points. The Sudoku 150! For Challenges is out now in the shop.

Buy Sudoku 150! For Challenges now
New: Buy Sudoku 150! For Challenges from Amazon.com

Related: Colour Cross Review, DSiWare service

Tags: Nintendo Points, Wii Points, Sudoku

Lux-Pain is a creepy anime story presented in the form of a visual novel on the Nintendo DS rather than a typical game. Lux Pain does have some interactive elements but there will be very few moments when you will be challenged or tested. As long as you bear this in mind you can take this DS title for what it’s supposed to be and enjoy it.

Your character, Atsuki Saijo, is investigating a plague that has struck Kisaragi City. Silent – a parasite that burrows into the body and drives its hosts to intense feelings of hatred and negativity has been spreading, causing its victims to commit terrible acts. Animals are being tortured and slaughtered in apartment buildings; suicides are being committed en masse and even Atsuki’s parents have fallen to the curse. The Silent is spreading from one source and it is your job to track it down and destroy it for good. It’s in the city somewhere, but where?

There are a number of locations in the city that you will need to explore. This is mostly done by simply tapping on a map which will take you to a still image of the place you are currently exploring. Because the environments cannot be interacted with (a la Phoenix Wright) the only possible events that can occur are a narration from Atsuki about the location or a conversation with one of the city’s esoteric citizens.

While you do have a small touch of control over the conversations (you can occasionally select an answer to a question, or a facial expression) most of the story will play out in front of you while you sit and listen. However most of the time you’ll be reading as this game is full of text! Atsuki has the power of ? (sigma), which means that he can sense Silent infections (called Shinen) and remove them. When he opts to do this a mini-game begins. You are shown the scene that needs disinfecting, whether it is a human you have been chatting to or an environment with someone’s Residual Shinen left on it. You will scratch away at this image with the stylus, until the little Silent worms reveal themselves. This will unlock a thought (usually called something vague and sinister like ‘That Boy’ or ‘I Want to Die’).

If this was taken from a person you then place the thought into their head so that you can read it. The contents of the thought will be displayed in a bizarre, dreamlike sequence on the top screen. This might give away a hint for the story, or it might just disturb you a little bit. After the game ends, an arbitrary points screen appears which rates you for how well you did, although you can’t really do badly, nor particularly well. With this mind-reading, along with the over-long conversations with a variety of anime chicks and Ricks, Atsuki is supposed to wander around the city and track down the source of the problem. This means bumbling around the various locations until a story event happens.

The lack of any decent gameplay makes this strictly a reading and listening exercise but a problem lies in this because the script is awful (presumably suffering from poor translation from its original Japanese source). At best this results in some very lazy sentences which includes examples such as: Ampersands in the place of ‘and’ plus random unexplained abbreviations which pop up out of nowhere leaving the reader befuddled. At worst there are sentences that make no sense whatsoever and seem to pay no attention to what came immediately before or after. The game even contradicts its own logic; the place Atsuki works for is interchangeably referred to as both ‘F.O.R.T’ and ‘Fort’.

Luckily the voiceover work is better. A decent amount of the dialogue is actually spoken by some worthwhile actors and while what they are saying doesn’t often match up with what’s on the screen, it usually makes a lot more sense. However it is also out of sync with the dialogue onscreen which often means you will often have finished reading it before it before the dialogue is half way through. All the music and sound effects are wonderfully atmospheric; the laments of lingering doubts and forgotten ghosts, it might be advisable to turn the volume up and close your eyes. You won’t be missing too much apart from some shoddy English usage and barely animated drawings.

Lux-Pain is scary and genuinely disconcerting but it lacks so much in so many different areas that it is hard to give the story the praise it deserves. Lux-Pain is not a game to be played late at night, or by an English professor. 3 out of 10, and that’s including a bonus point for the excellent soundtrack. If anything should have been released as a spoken word book and not a Nintendo DS release, it’s Lux-Pain.

Get Lux Pain now
New: Buy Lux Pain from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Lux Pain – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 review, Bleach The Dark Souls review

Tags: Lux Pain, DS, DSi, Anime, Horror, Nintendo DS, Atsuki Saijo, Anime

After such a long wait we can finally look forward to the upcoming blockbuster movie and accompanying video game releases of Harry Potter’s 6th adventure; Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Electronic Art’s have spent many months and worked very hard to make this the best Harry Potter video game to date and promise to keep as close to the storyline of the film whilst making the game fun and interactive for the player.

This time around Harry Potter faces his darkest and most terrifying battles yet and will need all of his magic skills and cunning to defeat the evils brought on by Lord Voldemort. You will need to help Harry, Ron and Hermione protect Hogwarts once again in the sprawling and detailed game which is jam packed full of exciting things to do which include;

• Competing in the exciting Quidditch Cup
• Learning new magic duelling skills and taking them into battle
• Creating exciting magic potions
• Taking part in cool and stealthy night time adventures in Hogwarts while everyone is asleep
• Exploring brand new magical areas outside of Hogwarts such as The Burrow and Horcrux cave

No matter what system you own you can look forward to Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince because it’s coming out for Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, PC, PSP, PS3, DS and Mobile phones. The Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince release date for North American fans is June 30th and the release date for Harry Potter 6 in the Europe is just 3 days later on 3rd July.

Buy Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince now
New: Buy Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince from Amazon.com

Related: The Lord of the Rings Conquest review, Iron Man review

Tags: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Harry Potter 6, Quidditch, Xbox 360, PS3, PC, PS2, PSP, DS, Wii, Mobile, movie, film

Bleach is one of those super-long running anime/manga series that is older than your gran and as hip as Espresso and Sudoku. There are exactly one zillion volumes of manga to read, and I’m unfamiliar with all of them. At the risk of offending any otaku in the audience, I will avoid trying to wrap my head around any of the storylines and instead offer up a brief summary of the manga. Here it is: Ichigo has accidentally become a Grim Reaper, and so he has to use his new powers to defend his fellow humans from sinister spirits.

What this means for DS owners is a brand new one-on-one 2D beat ‘em up to play around with. Who needs a plot? Here we have over 40 characters to brawl with, old school style, with the possibility of 4 player multiplayer brawls with just the one game cartridge.

Bleach: Dark Souls takes its inspiration more from SNK’s back catalogue than it does Capcom’s legendary Street Fighter series. Many of the warriors wield weapons, and the fights take place in arenas with two ‘planes’, so the characters can jump to and fro from the background and foreground. The sheer number of battlers on the roster has resulted in many of them not receiving much attention, while others seem ridiculously poor when compared to their companions. Still, 44 characters, with 4 colour schemes each, leads to a lot of variety.

When it comes to one-on-one fights, the game has occasional moments of excitement. You would think that adding more people into the mix would improve that but the DS’ small screens and lack of processing power makes the fights with 3 or 4 fighters awkward and confusing. Plus, in order to accommodate them all, the camera pans out and makes all the sprites jarringly small. I never thought I would look back at Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers fondly but at least that had the common sense to split its fights over both screens, making the action just about manageable.

This leads us to the question – if the fights are forced into the top screen, what’s going on at the bottom? This, sadly, is the game’s biggest flaw. Special moves are activated by pressing buttons on the touchscreen. That’s right. Not by charging up, or pulling off a 360 degree spin on the control pad, but by pressing the screen. While, I may add, you are trying to control the fight with the buttons. This is a shame as there are plenty of special moves and they all look impressive, but they’re so hard and unsatisfying to use. The friend I played Dark Souls with commented ‘I like to actually do my special moves, not have them done for me.‘

That doesn’t mean that Dark Souls is a complete mess. The multiplayer allows for four friends to play a complete and wonderfully customisable Versus mode, which not many games can pull off. I’m looking at you, Bomberman Land, which only lets you play one mini-game on Single Card Download Play before you have to turn the system off to try another one. The fact that a massive chunk of the game is available to be sent off to someone else’s DS with practically no limitations should be applauded. In addition, single player Dark Souls has some life in its Story Mode, which at least has some cool dialogue and mini-games. The storyline is standard fare and non-canonical to the real Bleach story, but what the heck, it will keep any portable beat ‘em up fan interested for a few hours at least.

If you can get your head around the unorthodox controls, the bright, detailed graphics and plethora of moves, characters and specials may keep you hooked. It’s by far the best fighter on the DS, but that’s not saying much. If you can spare a bit of cash for something you know from the beginning isn’t going to set the world alight with a blazing red fireball but is rather going to keep you and three friends button-bashing for half-hour bursts, then go for it. If you’re a bit hesitant to step out of your 2D beat ‘em up comfort zone though and prefer things to stay the way you like ‘em, track down one of the old GBA Street Fighter games. Bleach The Dark Souls for the Nintendo DS gets 5 out of 10.

Get Bleach The Dark Souls now
New: Buy Bleach The Dark Souls from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Bleach The Dark Souls – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: UFC Undisputed Review, Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix review

Tags: Bleach The Dark Souls, Bleach, Sega, DS, Dark Souls, Beat em up, Nintendo DS, Ichigo, manga, otaku

Rather unusually for a series of action figures, G.I. Joe (or Action Man for British Readers) actually started off as a toy and then moved into comics, a cartoon show and now the upcoming blockbuster movie G.I Joe The Rise of the Cobra. As most of you will probably already know, GI Joe is a tough action hero who can adapt to any scenario and learn any skill necessary to stop bad guys from the evil Cobra Organization. You could say he’s a tougher version of James Bond although I wouldn’t like to commit and say who would win if pitted against each other.

Hasbro have entrusted EA to develop the heavily anticipated tie in video game and from the looks of the latest GI Joe Video Game trailer it seems that was a jolly good idea because it looks full of action, guns and melee combat. G.I Joe The Rise of the Cobra video game is coming out on all platforms including 360, Wii, PS2 and PS3 and we’ll bring you more news as we get it.

The G.I Joe The Rise of the Cobra Release Date is August 4th in North America and 31st July in Europe.

Buy GI Joe Rise of the Cobra now
New: Buy GI Joe Rise of the Cobra from Amazon.com

Related: GI Joe Video Game trailer, Bionic Commando review

Tags: GI Joe, Rise of the Cobra, G.I. Joe, release date, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, PS3, DS

There’s a new Star Wars Battlefront game coming out for the PSP and Nintendo DS. It will be the second game exclusively for the handhelds and will feature 16-player multiplayer on the PSP and a 4 player mode on the DS.

Buy Star Wars Battlefront now
New: Buy Star Wars Battlefront from Amazon.com

Related: Star Wars The Force Unleashed review, Star Wars The Old Republic

Tags: Star Wars, Battlefront, Elite Squadron, PSP, Nintendo DS

With combined sales of around 100 million Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS lites one would wonder if Nintendo needed to develop a third iteration of their dual screen money printing machine but they have done it anyway. Have Nintendo improved on the already popular DSlite enough to warrant a new model and an increase in price? We’ll find out in my review of the Nintendo DSi. Assuming you know what the DS is we’ll skip the lengthy description of its two screens and stylus touch control.

So what have Nintendo changed from the second DS incarnation we all know and love, the DS lite? The biggest physical change of note is the removal of the Game Boy Advance slot. Now that Nintendo are confident that the Game Boy brand has been safely superseded by the less gender offending DS moniker they’ve taken the chance to strip out the legacy hardware and software which in many respects was holding the DS back. The fact was that GBA games have long since become a thing of the past and the GBA port was mainly being used for hardware devices such as the Guitar Hero on Tour hand grip and the Rumble cart.

With GBA out of the way Nintendo were free to look to the future and incorporate new technology into the DS Lite to bring it up to date in line with the more recent Nintendo Wii home console. Other physical differences include an increase in the size of both screens by a quarter of an inch but no change of screen resolution. Whilst this is an improvement, the DS screens still look teensy against the PSP’s giant widescreen display.

The DSi is now thinner and lighter than the DSlite but just like the PSP it’s still quite a wad if you plan to carry it in your back pocket all day; there’s a long way to go before it matches the GBA micro in terms of portability. The DSi is also coated in a matte finish, which in my opinion feels a bit weird and a little sand papery to the touch, but it’s not too bad and not something radically off-putting. I actually prefer the previous glossy coating of the DS lite and wasn’t too worried about the fingerprints – they were easy to wipe off. The DPad and buttons have all had a little change to make them click in when you press rather than a smooth press down. You could say they feel more digital now as opposed to analogue (although of course they were still digital buttons before). There are some other button changes but nothing drastic, not worth going into OCD detail about here.

Onto the cameras; the DSi features two low res 0.3 megapixel cameras (one internal and one external) which means you can take photos of things you’re facing as well as pictures of your own ugly face without having to turn the DSi around and guess where the lens is pointing. The cameras aren’t just for your holiday snaps though, as both cameras can be used by special DSi software, such as the new WarioWare Snapped downloadable game, which in the not so distant future could see a whole host of new interesting software using photos in interesting ways. It has to be said – the DSi cameras are quite low quality, and pictures only tend to look half decent when taken in brightly lit areas – photos taken in low light situations look quite horrid. Although the DSi is physically capable of capturing video with the cameras, Nintendo decided not to add the option. However it’s only a matter of time until it becomes available as either part of a firmware update or a downloadable application from the DSi Ware store.

A lot of people complained that the DS fat and DS lite had poor sound through its little speakers. Personally I was never too disturbed by it, as using earphones was the only true way to hear the music and sounds properly with the DS (or any portable device). Nintendo’s improvements to the speakers are noticeable here though, with much better clarity and less distortion. Finally we have the general specification bump: system RAM has been quadrupled and CPU speed greatly increased – it’s the addition of 256MB of internal flash memory which is the coolest. Just as with the Wii, the internal storage will allow for downloadable content (games and apps) to be stored on the system for instant access, or transferred to SD cards via the new SDHC slot which allows for a further 32GB’s of storage.

The DSi has been revamped with a new operating system which looks and feels much more like the Wii Menu system you are probably already used to. Instead of a grid of channels, the DSi features a single row which can be scrolled left to right. By default, 7 channels are preinstalled, these are the: Settings Menu, DS Game Boot, DSi Camera Channel, DSi Sound Channel, DSi Shop, DS Download Play and PictoChat. Glossing over the System Settings and DS Game channel, here are the more exciting features:

• The DSi camera channel is your hub for everything photo. After an interactive tour you will see a lovely calendar on the top screen. Your photos are displayed here, on the date that they were taken (there’s a slideshow if you’ve taken more than one photo on a particular day), along with any memo’s you’ve created. On the bottom screen you have nice big buttons which will allow you to view your photo albums stored on the DSi itself, or on a SD card which has been inserted. Your other choice is to go into camera mode – where obviously you can take photos, but also manipulate them in real time with a choice of eleven different lenses (or to be more precise, effects). Most of them are a bit silly (like putting a Mario Cap and Moustache onto your face), but they are also rather well implemented, and make clever use of basic face tracking and recognition technology. The nicest feature for me is that a random photo from your library will be displayed when the DSi menu is loaded, making the DSi feel much more personal to the owner. Photos can be moved to PC, Wii or another DSi by SD card, but other DSi owners can also use the Wireless Exchange option to transfer pictures using Wi-Fi – neat.
• The DSi sound channel acts as both a sound recorder as well as a playback device. Songs in AAC format can be played back from SD Card, and can even be remixed on the fly with the simple yet effective sound effect tools, such as speed and pitch change. Recorded voice (or other samples) can be stored, then loaded and played during song playback – which can result in either a glorious mess or fantastic new version of your favourite tunes. If you are clever enough to output the DSi sound via the earphone socket to your computer you could even save your remixes permanently on your PC. There are some other cool things you can do to mess around with your music whilst it’s playing – like turning the vocals down in a sort of Karaoke mode – but my favourite has to be 8-Bit mode, which makes everything sound like a NES or Commodore 64 game…which for retro geeks like me is the bee’s knees.
• The DSi shop channel is nearly identical to that of the Wii Shop Channel. You can go online and purchase new games and software using special ‘virtual currency’ called Nintendo Points, which can be purchased via credit card or special scratch cards sold in stores. The best news is that Nintendo load up your account with 1000 (£10/$10) worth of free points when you first visit the DSi shop, as a special gift (for a limited period). There are already some cool little games to buy, which are easily downloaded right to your DSi internal memory for keeps. Don’t forget you’ll need an active Wi-Fi internet connection, otherwise your DSi cannot go online. Currently there are rumours circulating of a Virtual Handheld Shop coming to DSi, which would allow you to buy classic Gameboy games. Hopefully this rumour will become a reality, but knowing Nintendo I wouldn’t bank on it just yet. The free Opera internet browser for DSi is available to download too, and is highly recommended for light web surfing, but lacks many features and the speed of typical PC web browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
• DS download play allows you to temporarily install DS demos to the DSI’s memory wirelessly from: the Nintendo Wii, other DS owning friends or special demo pods set up in Supermarkets and Game stores. This feature was available in the DS and DSlite, but many people didn’t know about it. This is also the channel you’ll need to use to play multiplayer DS games such as Mario Kart DS.
• PictoChat is another carry over from the original DS. It is a simple instant messenger application for local (not online) DS and DSi owning friends in a large group. Here you can wirelessly send messages and hand drawn pictures to each other. It’s not very good, and I’ve never met anyone who really used it.

The first thing to say is that the DSi will play all previous DS games that you can buy, except those that require the GBA slot, which is only a very small number of games. Another nice little feature is the ability to hot swap DS games and SD cards whilst in the DSi menu, without having to turn the DSi power off. In a similar manner, it is possible to change the brightness of the DS screens midgame, where previously you would have to quit to the old DS menu and reload the game. One thing worth mentioning is that due to the extra brightness and smaller battery capacity, the DSi’s battery life is a little shorter. It still offers around 14-20 hours of use per charge though (depending on the brightness level and amount of CPU power used by 3D gaming, or the Camera Channel lenses).

So, is the Nintendo DSi actually worth buying? If you are in the market for your first DS then, yes – the DSi is the best choice to go with – it has new abilities, and as it’s the latest model it is more futureproof (less likely to become outdated as soon as previous handheld consoles). If you have an older DS fat, the answer is also yes – the DSi is a fantastic upgrade. If however, you have a DSlite, then there is less of a reason to buy the newer model…unless you are interested in the possibilities that are opened up with the cameras, or the ability to purchase digital download games. Otherwise your DSlite will remain as effective as it is now as your DS and Game Boy Advance game player device. At £160/$170 the DSi is actually a trifle expensive – but so are many things in life. If the DSi sounds likes your cup of tea, then it is likely to be worth the money to you. If I had to award the DSi a score I would give it 8 out of 10.

Get Nintendo DSi now
New: Buy Nintendo DSi from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Nintendo DSi – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Nintendo DSi release date, DSi region unlocked

Tags: Nintendo DSi, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi, DSi

Are you getting the free Gamesweasel video show?

I haven’t seen the first Night at the Museum film or the second, but this is obviously a film license aimed at kids and aimed to sell alongside the movie. In the game you play the role of Larry Davey and when it gets dark, things once again come to life as you try to put a stop to an evil Egyptian power called Kahmunrah from taking over the world. He’s also employed the help of a few despicable characters from history including Al Capone, Napoleon and Ivan the Terrible in the Smithsonian museum in Washington.

As you explore the museum you use the power of your flashlight and your keychain to solve puzzles and put paid to the bad guys. You never fight them directly but can use the new Egyptian powers of your torch to make paintings come alive, fix objects, tame animals and make mechanical objects move of their own accord.

I put the game into the Wii expecting to hate it but was immediately charmed by the humour. Stiller’s likeness is ok and it’s his voice providing some genuinely funny lines between him and some of the other exhibits that come alive to help your cause. There’s also a fair amount of variety as you collect items, activate audio guides that tell you about exhibits and complete objectives using your torch and keychain. There’s even the odd fart joke to make kids or big kids like myself chuckle.

Technically the game’s not great and the frame rate does chug a bit on the Wii. It’s also incredibly short and can be easily completed in an afternoon.

I wouldn’t recommend buying this full price as it offers little replay value. It’s not great value for money but if you do choose to rent it, it’s an enjoyable adventure with a fun story and some fun puzzles and action moments.

For rental only, it’s worth a good 6 out of 10.

Get Night at the Museum 2 now
New: Buy Night at the Museum 2 from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Night at the Museum 2 – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Professor Layton and the Curious Village review, Zack and Wiki Quest for Barbaros Treasure review, Youtube Night at the Museum 2 review

Tags: Night at the Museum 2, Night at the Museum, Battle of the Smithsonian, Ben Stiller, movie, Xbox 360, Wii, PC, DS

Check out the free Gamesweasel video show now!

Anyone who’s played a ‘rhythm’ game recently has probably picked up a guitar or sat at a plastic drum kit and played along to some contemporary songs whilst dreaming of being a rock star.

Rhythm Heaven or Rhythm Paradise as it’s known in the UK takes the same mentality as the WarioWare games with lots of simple mini games based around rhythmic taps and flicks of the stylus where you must complete each cartoony challenge before you must move onto the next stage.

You may be flicking in time with the music to hammer bolts into square pieces of metal, tapping your stylus to make a little man sing in a choir or play table tennis with a blue-headed man. Everything’s very strange and Japanese but if gamers like anything, it’s a combination of what I’ve just mentioned.

And it’s actually quite challenging too. To get perfect scores you really need to have your wits about you and may fail a few times before you get things right. It’s a shame you can’t move onto another game until you’ve finished the one you’re on, but once you’ve played through a few stages you then have to use all the skills and tricks you’ve learned to play through a remix. Succeed here, and you can move onto the next tower and of course try to better your score on any previous mini-game.

The game’s not terribly long and there’s little replay value once you’ve played through each mini game, but it’s a perfect distraction here and there whilst you’re travelling from A to B.

If you’re looking for another WarioWare style game and you have headphones for the bus, then this is worth a look. It gets 7 out of 10.

Get Rhythm Heaven now
New: Buy Rhythm Heaven from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Rhythm Heaven – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Elite Beat Agents review, Guitar Hero On Tour review, Youtube Rhythm Heaven review

Tags: Rhythm Heaven, Rhythm Paradise, WarioWare, Nintendo, DS, Rhythm Heaven review

Maybe I’m just lucky but I’ve never had to stay in hospital other than the time when I was actually being born and I don’t really think that counts. However after staying for a week in a virtual hospital full of monsters on my new DSi the experience has put me right off my upcoming sense of humour reduction surgery. Dementium The Ward is a survival horror first person shooter for DS.

If you thought that such a game couldn’t be done on Nintendo’s low powered handheld then developers Renegade Kid are here to prove you wrong. Suddenly you wake up in a dark hospital room with no clue what’s happening; nothing immediately looks amiss but the fact that your room is only lit up by the lightning outside already sets a spooky atmosphere. A notepad is on the floor in front of you with the words ‘Why Did You Do It’ scrawled upon it and a metal key alongside. Simply tapping TAKE on the bottom screen collects them into your inventory ready for use. There is a single exit door to your room and the same key you just collected unlocks it, but if the key was on the floor doesn’t that mean the door must have been locked from the inside? As you step out of the door the first thing you notice is blood, there’s blood everywhere; on the floor, on the walls, everywhere. Perhaps it was a mistake to leave the safety of your room but you won’t find any answers in there – you’re only choice is to move forward and find out what has happened here. A recorded message is playing through the speaker system, ‘This is an emergency, everyone must evacuate the building, locate the nearest stairwell’. As you walk towards the voice recording you quickly notice that the doors to the stairs ahead are padlocked securely; the only other way is back towards more blood and a FMV sequence featuring a huge creature carrying a bloody cleaver dragging a woman away to her death – her terrified blue eyes fix on you and open wide seemingly asking for help but in a brief second they’re gone .

Spooky stuff eh? Well that’s just the start, if you’re easily scared it might be time to play something else because things in Dementium are not going to get any nicer. The basic premise of Dementium is to explore the hospital, find out what has happened, and survive. If you have previously played Doom 3 you will no doubt have experience of having to switch between a flashlight and weapons on the fly in order to navigate rooms and corridors to dispatch monsters. Well that experience will come in very handy because just like Doom 3 you’ll be exploring very dark rooms and corridors with your torch in hand but at any moment a monster could appear and will need to be killed quickly because this time you’re not a marine covered in protective armour and you certainly don’t have a plasma gun capable of cutting through flesh, to start with you just have a wardens nightstick to use as a club. For the most part you will be moving from floor to floor throughout the east and west buildings of the hospital taking mental notes of your surroundings with every step because each floor is very similar to the last and can even seem identical, you’ll need to use your memory and any torn maps you find to work yourself through. As soon as you think you know an area and become complacent whilst moving around you’ll find out you were wrong when something spews green acidic vomit onto you or breaks through a seemingly locked door. Unlike Doom 3 you will have to solve some riddles before you’ll be anywhere near escaping. Noting down number sequences written in blood on the walls and solving cryptic clues to find keys are just some of the things you’ll have to do if you want to find weapons to aid your escape. Because Dementium: The Ward is very linear I don’t want to describe too much about what happens because the best way to experience it is for yourself, so let me jump to the chase. It’s a very dark and scary game, there aren’t too many adult rated games on DS but Dementium is one of them.

Gameplay and cutscenes will spook you both physically and mentally. Just imagine Resident Evil meets Silent Hill Homecoming with a smidgen of Doom 3 and FEAR 2 thrown in for good measure and you’re well on your way to picturing Dementium. The question is; are you brave enough to try it? After just a couple of minutes you’ll see just in terms of technicality that Dementium is stunning, a fast slick moving FPS on Nintendo DS with real time lighting and fully 3D models is not only an achievement on the system but quite rare to find. Sure up close those textures are a little blocky but that was the case on every PlayStation 1 game and that didn’t stop the system from selling god near a billion units did it? Controlling yourself in Dementium is a dream (as long as you dream about simplicity that is) and because of the clever DS button layout, right and left handed players have a very similar control scheme. Glide the stylus over the touch screen to move your viewpoint and use the DPad to move backwards and forwards as well as strafing left and right. The shoulder button acts as your trigger finger and as soon as you find a gun (or two) you’ll be getting lots of use out of it. Collecting health and ammo is just a case of walking over them but both are in short supply so you’ll need to take your time and not get caught off guard by enemies. You’ll either need to turn your DS volume up high or wear some earphones if you want to experience the atmospheric music and effects at their best, it’s also worth noting that you can hear monsters from a distance so the easier you can hear the game the more time you’ll have to prepare for attack.

The boss battles are quite tough but thankfully you usually find a supply of health and ammo just outside their room, sadly you encounter each boss a couple of times (even know you’ve killed them once) which adds to the receptiveness of the already repetitive hospital layout from floor to floor and room to room. I would like to have seen a little more variation in all aspects of the game; the environments, the enemies, the gameplay and even the puzzles but even as it is this is a unique game on DS which deserves to be played. Even though enemies respawn if you have to back track through the level actually shooting hideous freaky beings in tight confined spaces with a shotgun is great fun whatever, just as long as you’re accurate and don’t use up all your ammo. Dementium The Ward is one of the first in a new line of DS games designed to push the hardware and challenge the hardcore player. It’s not perfect but would be considered a fairly good game on a console and considering it’s on a handheld I have to award an excellent 7 out of 10.

Get Dementium The Ward now
New: Buy Dementium The Ward from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Dementium The Ward – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Silent Hill Homecoming, Siren Blood Curse review

Tags: Dementium The Ward, Dementium, The Ward, Survival horror, DS, Doom, Silent Hill, Fear 2, Dementium: The Ward

Get the free Gamesweasel video – easy and free!

Henry Hatsworth is yet another fantastic game for the DS and another shining example of how great the DS can be if its two screens are used in the correct way.

You play as the afore-mentioned Professor Hatsworth as you perform platforming duties on the top screen and puzzling on the bottom screen. Whilst on the search for a golden suit you accidentally open a gateway to the puzzle realm and lots of cute but deadly creatures stand in your way as you run, leap, cut and shoot your way through the levels. Once you defeat an enemy, it falls into the puzzle on the touch screen. Press the X button at any time and you enter the puzzle to shift blocks horizontally to make groups of three. Do this and they disappear. You’ll need to use this to make the enemy blocks go away before they get back to the top screen where they’ll try and get their revenge. The puzzle can also be used to collect health and power ups and to increase the strength of any projectiles you may be firing at the time.

Fill up your super meter on the right and you can touch the screen to wear a big indestructible robot suit. This bit reminds me of Michael Jackson’ Moonwalker only not as rubbish.

It may require a bit of multi-tasking to keep your eyes on both screens at once, but the good news is everything works incredibly well. The platforming controls are tight and there’s enough variety to keep you playing right to the end. There are also some boss battles as you’d expect which have the usual attack patterns to learn and avoid.

Presentation also fits the game perfectly. It’s all very ‘Round the World in 80 Days’ with some funny characters and scripts. The gibberish noises they make when they speak can get a bit annoying but thankfully you only hear this during the cut-scenes. If you’ve finished GTA Chinatown Wars and you’re looking for something else to keep you amused on the bus or the train, this could definitely be it. Henry Hatsworth gets an excellent 8 out of 10.

Get Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure now
New: Buy Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: GTA Chinatown Wars, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, YouTube Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure review

Tags: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, Henry Hatsworth, Puzzling Adventure, DS, Nintendo DS, puzzle game

The Nintendo DS is a breeding ground for remakes, especially of old PC titles that were never able to transition properly across to consoles. That’s the beauty of the touchscreen for you, it’s like a keyboard and a mouse wrapped up in one. Classic strategy games Theme Park and Sim City have already made the leap into the 21st Century, and received fairly mixed reviews. Now it’s the turn of the original god sim, Populous, to rise up and bring early Nineties point-and-click style back into fashion. Bow down and worship Populous DS, which is, shockingly, Populous on the DS.

Populous was pretty big back in 1990, in part because it put you in the shoes of a god. Over one of the game’s many available landscapes, your people (dressed in blue rags) would wage war on the followers of your rival demon (who are dressed in red rags), ultimately culminating in Armageddon. To increase your tribe’s populous and power, you must use the miracles available to you. The most basic of these miracles allows you to landscape the world, creating flat land for your people to build on. This helps them grow in number. Get enough peeps together and you can use your divine powers to appoint leaders and warriors to strengthen your ranks. The more land your people claim as their own, the greater your power gets, until you can unleash devastating natural disasters against your foes, decimating their towns. Of course, the enemy demon has got pretty much the same idea as you, so look out for any damage his people and powers may cause. The gameplay may seem basic compared to the complex strategy games you can find on PC World shelves these days, but this was the original and there was a charm to its apparent ‘simplicity’. The game may seem easy, but it was a nightmare to conquer, and required the patience and management skills of a… well, a god. Or a really patient manager.

The DS version adds to this story by offering you control of five different gods, who are unlocked over the course of the Challenge mode. The gods are Earth, Fire, Wind, Water and Harvest – each has the relevant elemental powers such as tsunamis and volcanoes… Wait, did I say ‘Harvest’? That guy’s seriously called Harvest? My favourite elemental power is the ‘Brainwash Pool’ – marshland that swallows up your enemies and spits them back out as your followers.

Of course, this isn’t all that the DS remix offers us – the entire gameplay system has been broken down and rebuilt, complete with new levels, a tutorial and bonus game modes (and a Gallery that nobody cares about). Touchscreen controls bring the isometric and potentially cumbersome screens to life – clicking in the relevant places on the map can now issue instructions to your peeps, deliver pain to your foes and, most importantly, landscape your territory. The stylus makes for a fairly clumsy landscape tool at first, but once you are accustomed to the isometric view, dragging the land up and down becomes natural. The top screen shows you what the map actually looks like (complete with your roaming villagers and their cosy huts), while the bottom screen is designed to highlight the shape of the ground and how it can be manipulated in order to assist you.

Providing a mixture of old and new levels (fifty of them in total, plus a Free Play mode), Populous DS is fairly substantial in size. Of course, that’s mostly because every level is a pain to tackle, and I spent most of an evening waging war on the very first map. This isn’t a game for lightweights or newbies – anyone interested in revisiting Populous must be ready for basic, yet demanding controls, dominating enemies and an old school work ethic that will squeeze blood and sweat from your palms.

Of course, it’s supposed to be fun! And, technically, it is. There’s a wealth of interesting variety to the levels and powers to keep things from growing stale. Like the original game, there are worlds of ice and fire, each presenting unique threats, while there are newer worlds, ranging from Ancient Japan to 8-Bit World, which stars old Nintendo consoles as parts of the scenery. Free Play mode allows you to customise the level to your own specs, while Warrior Hunt sets you ‘Where’s Wally?’ style tasks. Of course, the biggest and best variant is the multiplayer. Three fellow gods can join you on the battlefield, and while this is far from the most intense multiplayer mode ever, gathering your people to fight real opponents is so much more enjoyable than getting stomped on by the DS. Think of it more like playing ‘Risk’ than ‘Twister’, get some middle-class beers in, and have a quiet, strategic evening of intense wargaming.

This is a masterful reinterpretation of the original classic, which not only puts a new coat of paint on the old girl but also buys her a new wardrobe. Like the original, the graphics are plain, with animation only making a brief cameo, but the soundtrack is relaxed and thought-provoking. If you loved Populous, then there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t like this – just make sure you try it out and make sure you still actually like it and not just like the memory of it, because it is quite a difficult game to like. It’s hard – surprisingly so – and not the most interactive of experiences. In fact, the original game engine has been beaten so many times over the years by the likes of Civilization that all that Populous DS has going for it is nostalgic appeal and bare bones, rock-hard simplicity. If you liked it when games were tough, but didn’t require five million buttons, then Populous has enough game modes, options, variety and general junk in its trunk to provide you with a substantial, enduring, challenging experience. A love-it-or-hate-it 8 out of 10.

Get Populous DS now
New: Buy Populous DS from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Populous DS – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Advance Wars Dark Conflict review, Worms Open Warfare 2 review

Tags: Populous DS, Populous, Nintendo, DS

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has announced a few new things for the Wii and DS. There’s a new Zelda game on the way on the DS called The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks which controls similarly to The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass but this time you use a steam train to move about the land. They’ll also be rolling out high capacity SD cards to save all your WiiWare and Virtual Console games onto.

Buy The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks now
New: Preorder The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks from Amazon.com

Related: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Zelda on the Wii

Tags: Nintendo, Legend of Zelda, Spirit Tracks, DS, Satoru Iwata

Rising Star Games’ Harvest Moon series has lived a healthy life under the radar for a good few years now – never kicking up enough of a fuss to get itself noticed, but always providing enough quality ‘farm sim’ entertainment to build up and satisfy a decent audience. A game based on the life of a farmer – including all of the necessary manual labour and time management skills – was never going to set the world on fire, after all. With Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, some effort has been made to pep up the formula a little bit with the introduction of some role-playing elements. This time ‘round, your little farmer friend can battle monsters, explore caves and look tough with a sword. Dramatic.

A surprisingly good introduction movie (with full anime graphics and even a song) manages to completely avoid setting the scene in that vague way that movie trailers do. When the action calms down, you are placed in the shoes of an amnesiac who wanders into the small village of Kardia. Sound familiar, Final Fantasy fans? Hey, if the plot ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This guy (you can choose the name) has no idea who he is, but he knows he’ll die pretty soon if he doesn’t get some food and water. Luckily, he meets Mist – a perky, if somewhat strange, young girl who is willing to take him in. She offers him room and board if he works on her fields, sowing seeds and reaping the crops. A brief encounter with a rather underwhelming critter shows that, even if the lost boy doesn’t remember it, he seems to be a trained fighter. He’ll need those skills if he plans to head to the caves outside of the village, but we’ll take a look at those later.

Once you’re settled, you’ll be tasked with a field which needs tidying up and looking after. This is where you’ll be growing your crops. Tending to the farm can be a repetitive, dull experience at first, or at least it is for a gamer who leans more towards frags and QTEs for his kicks. This element of Rune Factory’s gameplay combines the manual labour aspects of Animal Crossing with the resource management of, say, Theme Park or Sim City. Clean up a patch of soil, plant some seeds, water them daily, pick the crop, sell it in town, use the money to buy more seeds and better supplies. Be careful that you don’t use up all of your stamina though, or you’ll collapse. Manage your Rune Points (your energy levels, basically) carefully and get to bed early.

While the clunky control system takes some getting used to, and the stylus is not utilised to the extent that it should be (looking at Animal Crossing’s controls really puts this to shame), it should not take too long for you to finish up all the chores your Rune Points will allow you to do. When you get bored of hanging around the farm, a trip into town will reveal to you the interesting characters and storylines that you can get yourself involved in, along with the merchants you’ll be trading with. Impressing the girls can earn you their hand in marriage, while doing a good job for the King will get you passes to the caves outside town.

This is when the RPG elements come in. Exploring the caves is a lot more fun than toiling in the farms (at least, it is for this gamer). Plenty of old school dungeon crawling is mixed with a responsive, real-time combat system that will get you tapping on those buttons like a loon. If you can manage to capture a monster, you can force it to work in your farm and take care of all the naff stuff that you don’t want to do, and there’s magic to dabble in too. This sideline RPG is an excellent improvement to the standard Harvest Moon template. While Harvest Moon DS bored me to tears with its endless dialogue, dangerously bad controls and harsh, boring tasks, Rune Factory kept me hooked. Not only was that due to a massively improved game engine and stylish graphics, but the dungeon crawling provides escapism from any potential tedium.

In all honesty, Rune Factory will require a great deal of patience. I was very nearly put off it at first as it seemed to be harder work than actually looking after my own garden. But, while it might start off slow and restricting, it will eventually blossom into a fun, rewarding experience – your labour will pay off and provide you with some worthwhile benefits, improving your house and finding yourself a bride will make you care about the game world, and once you’ve got your farm in proper working order, the caves will provide a compelling alternative to the standard game play and also, the actual plot. It could do with better controls and having to manage your stamina and making sure you get to bed on time can get awfully annoying, but you will grow used to these bugbears in time and you will learn the true meaning of hard work paying off. It will eat up a lot of your time and sometimes you’ll forget this is supposed to be a fun game, but it’s an ambitious, detailed, witty adventure with a protagonist who wields a watering can in one hand and a long sword in the other. Brilliant.

Harvest Moon fans – grab this now, the RPG elements have not watered down the core experience. RPG fans – if you really enjoy developing your characters and helping them grow, this will be great for you. Sim fans – managing your money, time, energy and crop is a tasty challenge. This is not a perfect game but you will get back what you’re willing to put in. 8 out of 10.

Get Rune Factory now
New: Buy Rune Factory from Amazon.com
Rental: Rent Rune Factory – free rental trial from Gamefly.com

Related: Spectrobes Review, Chrono Trigger Review

Tags: Rune Factory, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Harvest Moon, A nimal Crossing, Sim City, Theme Park, Rising Star Games