I don’t know if you’ve heard of Harry Potter. A lesser-known British series of children’s novels, the titular character and his adventures in the magical school Hogwarts has earned somewhat of a cult following amongst school children. Oddly enough, the series has also spawned a few movies and video games; the latest in the series of cash-ins is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on the Nintendo DS. So in an attempt to spread the word a bit and hopefully get more people interested in Master Potter’s magical stories here is our review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for DS.

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.

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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

Tags: Populous DS, Populous, Nintendo, DS

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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.

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Related: Spectrobes Review, Chrono Trigger Review

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

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It’s good that we have this little bit of space to discuss Colour Cross, the Rising Star puzzle game for the Nintendo DS. It’s all too easy for budget releases like this to fall through the net and not receive any decent coverage. Most budgets really deserve this, but Colour Cross does not. Also, it’s far too easy to label Colour Cross as a simple rip-off of Nintendo’s Picross DS. And, yes, while they are both based on the same core game system, CC develops and adds enough to the original idea to make it more than stand out.

For those unfamiliar with the rules of Picross, it’s a deceptively simple-looking puzzler that combines the logic required for a game of Sudoku with the style of a Paint By Numbers picture. Each puzzle presents the player with an empty grid of squares, with corresponding number clues on each horizontal and vertical line. Say, for example, the top horizontal line is marked with ‘5, 2’. This means that in that line there will be a block of five shaded squares, then a gap of one or more squares, and finally a block of two shaded squares. If it simply states ‘7’, then there’s a string of seven uninterrupted blocks on that line somewhere. Using your knowledge of the layout of the rest of the grid, you will place the shading in the right places until you reveal the secret picture. Step out of line and shade in the wrong bit, and you’ll be hit square in the head with a Time Penalty, which tries its very best to ruin your fastest speed chase.

Colour Cross amplifies the difficulty by making the picture full colour, leaving you to deal with the complicated task of painting it with the right hues. Each colour will have its own set of number references which can be swapped between by tapping on the relevant splodge of paint on the right of the touchscreen. So, not only do all the number clues need to tie in with each other, now so do all the colours. Prepare yourself for a few head-scratching moments.

Hypnotised by the funky, chilled background music, I was instantly charmed by Colour Cross’ presentation. Four save slots allowed my whole family to get involved and create their own profiles. There is a distinct lack of modes on offer. Aside from a straightforward and digestable Tutorial, there is simply a set of 150 puzzles, split up into 10 categories (Candy, Magic, Baby, Medieval, Decoration, Horror, Fashion, Science Fiction, Love and Pirate). That’s it. None of the time trials or gimmicky alternative modes that were presented by rival Picross DS. Just straight up no-thrills puzzlement. Success with a puzzle will unlock part of a larger picture, which will be fully visible upon completion of the entire category as a reward. Think the Bonus Catchphrase bit on Catchphrase and you’ll understand.

The difficulty curve is so steep that you’ll need a grappling hook to get over it. After the first puzzle of each section comes a series of relentless, brain-busting grids, designed to challenge you at every step of the way. Some of the puzzle designs are a little too large to comfortably fit onto the touchscreen, and although there is the option to zoom in and scroll around, this makes it a lot easier to get disorientated and mixed up. The puzzle size also makes some of the numbers on the sides difficult to read. The touchscreen is mostly accurate, but concentration and strict accuracy is necessary as it is very easy to slip up and wind up damaging your time. Here’s a hint – use the ‘X’ option to eliminate any squares that you know will not be used, cutting your risk liability and making the future of the puzzle a lot cleared to you.

The inevitable question we must address is ‘How do this compare to Picross DS?’. More to the point, I’m sure the one thing that Picross lovers want to learn from this Colour Cross review is whether it is worth buying. The short answer is – A little too complicated. Personally, I grew very fond of Colour Cross, despite its lack of depth. The gameplay, despite its derivative nature, is unique enough to be worthwhile – having the colours involved really does make this a taxing rival to the original game. In fact, it makes Picross DS look like child’s play. The only thing it does lack is the range of options. It fails to deliver the downloadable content and multiplayer goodies of Picross DS, meaning that as an all-round package it is not quite good enough. But, as a graduation from Picross, or as a sweet, no-nonsense puzzle game that is guaranteed to entertain and stump you in equal measures, there are few that are better.

Colour Cross deserves the right to have its own existence, without being tossed to the side as a simple clone. It improves on the original, tightens it up and changes the game (literally). Newcomers to the Sudoku-esque puzzler world, fans of the original game and simply those looking for a mountain to climb will love picking this up. Colour Cross earns itself a very solid 8 out of 10.

Related: Nintendo DS buyers guide for Christmas 2008, Jewel Master Cradle of Rome Review

Tags: Colour Cross, Colour Cross, DS, Nintendo DS, puzzle game, Rising Star, Picross DS