'J' has always proven difficult when I've done alphabetically organised lists before, so it's no surprise that I'm including the equally limited selection from games beginning with 'K' alongside it this week.
Quick recap: To facilitate this exercise I played every game made available on the DSiWare service and, once I 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!
Well Known & Wonderful
Jelly Car 2 offers a rather neat lens through which to view the pitfalls of digital distribution.
Upon release, this DSiWare port, along with it's pretty much identical siblings on PSP and WiiWare, were criticised for offering less content than the iOS version at a higher cost. Fast forward a little over a decade and the various states of preservation for iOS and Nintendo software and firmware means that these 'lazy ports', as games like this were branded at the time, are by far the easiest way to play this fun puzzle-platformer.
Jelly Car 2 is presented as hand-drawn assets with made-by-a-human sound effects and signature 'soft-body' physics.
The levels are mostly structured as left-to-right challenges with all the moving platforms and jumps that you would expect. There are power-ups too, such as sticky wheels, and the ability to temporarily increase the size of your car.
With these tools at your disposable you advance towards the goal in as fast a time as the wobbly, weight shifty, bouncy physics allow.
It's all exactly as much fun as it was 10 years ago, with some genuine head-scratcher levels and others that are just about careening along as fast as possible.
There's an additional long jump mini-game and another that's a basically a colour sorting machine that's more entertaining than it has any right to be.
All in all, whether you're revisting this as a lost phone favourite, or playing for the first time, Jelly Car 2 is a lot of fun, both in it's (perhaps a little try-hard) presentation and in it's pick-up-and play design.
Yet another Art Style game with a different name in every territory. This one is known as Precipice in North America and Nalaku in Japan, I'm in the UK though, so Kubos it is!
By this point I probably don't need to tell you that any entry in this series has a minimalist audio-visual style. This time round, Kubos' main play screen is a five by five layer of cubes. Atop which stands a little silhouette character who serves as your player.
Points are scored by walking over the top of as many of these cubes as possible. Hazard and progress is provided by the same means; additional cubes that fall from the sky.
When you first start the game there is only a single mode. The aim of this is ascend ten levels. So, as the new blocks fall from above and build a new layer you have to climb, ever upwards, to the goal. There's the additional jeopardy of only three levels being viable at once, with the lowest one periodically disappearing into the abyss below, and further complexity is added with health pick-ups and a shove ability earned by standing on special cubes.
Getting up to the tenth level opens a second play mode. In this 'Endless' version the play area is reduced to three-by-three with the unsurprising goal of staying alive and scoring as many points as possible.
And, as much as that sounds limiting, it's actually Endless Mode where the game really shines. The pace of this mode suits a game of this style much better, and it bring a good old fashioned kind of 'just one more go' addictiveness.
Kubos might not be the best or most striking game in the Art Style series, but it's nevertheless a very worthwhile game in the DSiWare library.
Testament, I think, to the carefully curated efforts that have made their way to the Bit Generations/Art Style brand over the years.
In an effort to moderate your expectation, I should say up front that this isn't a Katamari game as you would recognise it. Interestingly, though, you might recognise it as something else.
It will be fairly obvious, to anyone who has played it, that Korogashi Puzzle is nearly identical to Pac-Attack; the Tetris-esque block puzzle that Namco Released in 1993. If you're familiar with Pac-Attack you'll know that it had a mechanic whereby ghosts needed to be lined up in a row in order to turn blue so that a Pac-Man tile could be dropped to clear them. Obviously this situation would not fit well in the world of Katamari, so it has been removed.
What's doubly interesting is that this is actually makes the game even more similar to Cosmo Gang: The Puzzle, the 1992 arcade game that was tweaked and re-skinned as Pac-Attack in the first place.
All three games have the same basic mechanic; a combination of square bricks and 'character bricks' fall from the top of the screen. Square bricks can be eliminated by forming horizontal rows, character bricks must be removed by dropping the respective game's title character(s) into the 'well' - who will destroy/eat/roll them up.
Katamari's own twist on the formula is that 1 of three blocks can be chosen, with the stylus, to fall into the play area next.
Going all the way back to it's origins, this was always a fun if unspectacular falling-block puzzle game, and despite the usual off the wall art and sound effects Korogashi Puzzle Katamary Demacy can be described in much the same way.
Honourable Mentions
Jump Trials and Jump Trials Extreme
I was unsure as to whether I should list these two together but, as much as 'Extreme' is definitely it's own game, the improvement over it's predecessor are pretty iterative, so I think this is the right way to go.
At their core both games are the same. We're back in stick-figure platformer territory here with a ten second time limit in one mode, and a bronze, silver, or gold award system in the other.
You control the little avatar with the d-pad and 'A' button, so moving and jumping are the limits of your abilities. Using this set of skills you have to navigate a series of single and multi-screen levels replete with traps and hazards.
As previously mentioned, the difference between the two games are minimal. In the first game the graphics are beyond simplistic, in the sequel a little more colour is added. In the original jumping is a tad floaty, in the sequel this has been improved. Most notable of all, however, is the addition of a quick-restart button (select) which is essential for this micro-platformer sub genre and felt like a bad omission in the original game.
And, in that genre, this is a decent entry. It's obviously not as polished as something like Super Meat Boy, and not as devilishly difficult as VVVVVV, but it does it's own thing with a certain amount of commitment - especially in the sequel - and for me, that should be applauded.
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