A good selection this week, with at least a couple of absolute bangers for your enjoyment - despite a complete lack of hidden gems.
Quick recap: To facilitate this exercise I played every game made available on the DSiWare service and, once I had weeded out the shovelware, I have divided the remainder into four categories:
Hidden Gems: Games you've probably never heard of that are utterly brilliant
Well Known & Wonderful: Still gems, still potentially brilliant, but perhaps not quite so 'hidden'
Honourable Mentions: Those games that are good, but lack the real spark required to fit into one of the top two categories
Also Rans: Not bad enough to be completely ignored, but probably not quite good enough to warrant higher status
Two caveats: Firstly, I don't enjoy RPGs. Like, at all. So you won't see any of those at any point. And secondly it's very hard to define 'Hidden Gem' on DSiWare, as the service itself was never hugely popular, so please excuse a potential few miss-categorisations along the way!
A good haul of games to plough through today, so lets get on with it!
Well Known & Wonderful
Enjoy Up games is a name I've seen a lot during my time with DSiWare and, while not every game is great, very few are particularly bad.
Chronos Twin is certainly one of their more polished efforts. But then, considering it began development on the GBA in 2006, was released as a boxed DS game, and then released again digitally on the WiiWare service - all prior to turning up on the DSiWare in 2010... that shouldn't really be a surprise.
There are a couple of sources that claim the GBA version was actually released in the UK. However, I can find no real evidence to support that. Nowhere on the internet could I find so much as a box art image, let alone a rare, potentially very expensive cartridge.
The game itself has the protagonist temporally split so that they then appear on both the top (present) and bottom (past) screens at the same time. From here you must undertake platforming, shooting, and light puzzle solving - along with an abundance of boss fights - to make your way through the levels.
This is a very slick product. The graphics are wonderfully reminiscent of the best of the 16bit era. The backgrounds alone feature a huge amount of detail and embrace that old favourite effect of mine; parallax scrolling. The sprites are impressive too and, while our hero Nec isn't the most agile, the character design and animations are top notch.
Obviously the majority of challenge and fun comes from playing two screens at once, and the game handles this brilliantly. There's a genuine thrill to even something as basic as starting a jump on one screen and landing it on another. Boss fights are a particular joy and consistently do their job of making the player want to see what the next one will be like.
If you missed this in either of its other two guises, I can assure you that it's well worth a look, probably even two.
I'm going to confess right away here that maths has never been my strong suit. I only just scraped a 'C' in my GCSEs (at the second time of asking) and can't recite a times table higher than 5 without slowing down to think.
And yet, for the second time in just 4 instalments, I'm here to tell you that a game with maths at its core is brilliantly addictive and deceptively creative. (I'm also here to tell you that despite my scholarly shortcomings I'm doing pretty well for myself, thank you very much for asking - Stay in school, kids!)
This is another game in the reliable Art Style series and, like many of it's stablemates, it has several names dependant on your region. 'Code' is the European name, in Japan it's 'Decode', and in the US they changed it to 'Base10'.
Whatever the name, the game comes with the usual minimalist art, sound, and music you would expect from the series. The screens, held in 'book mode', display a grid of old style LCD numbers and it's up to the player to find pairs and rows that total ten.
This simple foundation is brilliantly complicated by the ability to swap pairs of numbers that are adjacent either vertically or horizontally - with the act of doing so 'flipping' them and therefore reversing certain numbers.
It will, for example, turn a 5 into 2 if flipped in either direction. But by the same mechanic a 4 flipped in either direction becomes unusable.
True to form for this series there are a couple of modes available to play. First is 'Puzzle', a mode I find utterly impenetrable even as I write this glowing review. This mode has you aiming to clear a set number of tiles in a preset formation. You might love it, I just can't get the hang of it.
Luckily, Challenge Mode is unstoppably addictive, and the version of the game that has consumed all of my play time so far. It's ostensibly a more recognisable format, with numbers gradually filling the screen and the player working hard to clear them. It's elevated, initially, by all the numbers on the touchscreen side (rather than just a bottom row) being playable. So rather than being maths-tetris, the game feels more like a mix of a word search, sliding block puzzle, Sudoku, and a furiously paced exercise in lateral thinking. You play towards a target in this mode, and the sense of relief and achievement when you reach one and can take a breather is quite extraordinary.
There are two other modes available. 'Endless' plays identically to Challenge but doesn't have the aforementioned targets, so is not as satisfying to play. There's also a versus mode which I, unfortunately, have been unable to experience.
Not that it matters, this would be a great game were it just the one mode, so having a few others to play with, should the fancy take you, is the cherry on top of a lovely digital cake.
Honourable Mentions
Cosmos X2
I deliberated for a good while as to whether or not to give this horizontal shooter hidden gem status but, in the end, the good idea at the core couldn't quite outweigh some other issues that I'll get to in a bit.
That good core idea, though, is that rather than choose between two weapon load-outs for your spaceship, you choose two configurations for it to transform into.
This transformation changes not just the fire pattern, but also the function of the shield. Gun types are of the unimaginative spread, homing, etc variety, but shield types are slightly more imaginative. They can only be used for a second or two before recharging and where one may absorb the energy from enemy fire, another might reflect their ordnance back at them.
The game also borrows the energy mechanic from tag-team fighting games, so whichever configuration you're not using recovers its energy. So far so interesting.
There are a couple of reasons the game doesn't quite sneak a Hidden Gem award. The first is the speed. I'm not a fan of bullet hell games, so that's not the problem here. The problem is that everything moves quite slowly and a lot of enemies are total bullet sponges; so the pace overall is sluggish at best.
The second issue is the visual design. Uninspired, would be a polite way of putting it. The developers have gone for a sort of 'soft' look, with the three ship designs not possessing a single straight line between them. Another player might feel differently, but to me the design of everything was either generic, or bordering on ugly.
On balance I think Honourable Mention is the right call. Some of the things it tries to do might not be born out in play, but I'd rather have an ugly game with ideas than a pretty one with none.
Car Jack Streets
Ported from the iPhone original, this is a rather successful clone of the classic top-down, open world, GTA style of old. Unfortunately, the DSiWare version is stripped back in a number of ways, and the intermittent 'real time' play doesn't really work for a device that, in 2021, you're unlikely to have with you every day.
It's definitely worth a play, as it can be a lot of fun despite the hugely derivative nature. However it's a game out of time, and a poor fit on what is now considered by many to be a retro platform.
It's Cut the Rope, what more can I say?
Okay, I'll add a little more, but it feels a bit pointless trying to describe the gameplay of one of the most popular mobile phone games of all time.
Nevertheless... This is a physics puzzle game. There's a round sweet, or 'candy', at the top of the screen that must be manipulated to fall into the mouth of 'Om Nom', a cute green monster, at the bottom of the screen
Unsurprisingly, DSiWare is not the best way to play this game. It's much better suited to a tablet or any device with a larger screen. The stylus helps it to work better than you may expect, but it's not perfect.
Additionally, While I admit that I haven't played through the 100 levels on the DSi, I know from the mobile version that some later puzzles require a multi-touch screen to solve - so I'm not sure how they're going to work on a device that doesn't have that functionality.
But, to reiterate my original point: It's Cut The Rope; of course it's worth a go, it is (or maybe was) hugely popular for all the right reasons.
Also Rans
This is an arena brawler with lots to like. It's fast and energetic, well designed, and has a likeable style. Unfortunately it's incredibly limited in single player and, let's face it, the chances of getting together a couple of DSis to play it with a friend are pretty low.
Cosmo Rally
A top down racer where every track is rainbow road. But rather than racing it's a time trial, and rather than plummeting to your death you just lose time. It's a neat idea but, in the end, there's not enough variety or interest here to be worth more than a cursory play.
Conveyor Toy Packaging (G.G. Series)
This isn't as bad a colour-matching puzzler as its awful title may suggest. But, frustratingly, it takes a fairly unique idea and tries to ruin it with bad implementation. To this end, a fun, interesting take on the format is ruined by progress only being possible until the uncapped speed and entirely random patterns make it impossible to continue.
Well, hope there's something in that selection to keep you entertained until next week when I'll be back with a huge selection for 'D'.
I'll see you then!
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