Be Excellent To Each Other

So, I have a lot of MAGIC MONEY that I can use to BUY Nintento DS games. Quite a lot of us have MAGIC MONEY. So, what should we be SPENDING our MAGIC MONEY on?

I would like to nominate:

New Super Mario Bros - one of the best Mario games ever made for any system, reckon.
Picross - excellent sort-of-maths-based puzzle game
Puzzle Quest - I can't tell you why it's good, but for some reason I can't stop playing it.
Advance Wars (Dual Strike, Days of Ruin and Dark Conflict) - near-perfect turn based stratagy war games
Professor Layton (Pandora's Box and The Curious Village) - lots of puzzle mini-games based around a 'mystery-solving' main game
Space Invaders Extreme - like Space Invaders but MOAR BEST
Castlevania Dawn Of Sorrow - platformy vampire-em-up
Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars - a technical marvel, it's GTA Lite

The Phoenix Wright series. Utterly glorious adventure games. Linear as fuck, but glorious.

Puzzle Series Vol. 6: Illust Logic. Better version of Picross than Nintendo's IMHO. Japan-only but the language barrier is fairly easy to get around.

Pic-Pic. "If you like x, you'll love y" where x = Picross and y = Pic-Pic.

Retro Game Challenge. Compilation of retro-style games with a nifty back-to-the-80s time-travel storyline.

Reminds me, I stopped playing this a week after I bought it, in July '07. Have to dig it out for a play.

New Super Mario Bros is good, admittedly not Triple-A quality like the Super Mario Worlds or Yoshi's Islands of this world, but it's definitely recommended. Think along the lines of Super Mario Land and SML2, but more direct influence from the original Super Mario Bros, and you're there.

Animal Crossing: Wild World is good, for new-comers to the digital crack that is Animal Crossing. The other two in the series beat it in terms of features, but the concept works best on a handheld, even if the execution is more limited.

Pic-Pic and Slitherlink are awesome puzzle games that my girlfriend has played many, many times, quite often. Both quite difficult to track down these days though, but massively worth it if you.re a fan of the genre.

Chrono Trigger. It's Chrono Trigger! But on the DS. Don't let it out you off being a J-RPG, and a J-RPG from 14 years ago. It's held in high regard for a reason. By nerds.

Mario Kart DS is Mario Kart Wii, but scaled-down, or conversely, MK Wii is the DS game scaled up. Whilst it doesn't reach the heights of the mighty Double Dash, I doubt the DS will ever get a better racing game. What it lacks in longevity it makes up for in compulsive play.

Bangai-o Spirits is a quirky hardcore game that is very unique and will make you completely addicted, if you "get" it.

Additionally, Zoo Keeper, Polarium and Wario Ware Touched are some entertaining DS launch games you should be able to get for absolutely nothing these days. Zoo Keeper in particular is mesmerisingly addictive.

End of an Era's Big List of Games He's Enjoyed on the Dintendo NS Not Already Mentioned:

The Dark Spire.

Was I too subtle?

Ooh, what's that?

Are you referring to intercourse again?

ISWYDT.

Super awesome is what. It's an RPG, but with really basic graphics - much like those you'd see in an 80's "graphical" adventure. Don't let that put you off, though, it's a great game and plays much like a modern adventure-cum-rpg but with less of the rubbish that you see in modern rpgs, which are largely style over content.

Given that you (and Doc G) invent games like "Wld u lk 2 ply a gme?", which rely on imagination, I think you'll like it. I enjoyed it immensely.

Err *racks brains for stuff not already mentioned*

Metroid Pinball
42 All-Time Classics

I'll get back to you.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife.
Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2.

You totally forgot Scribblenauts.

I didn't, I'm afraid. Technically wowsers, but once you get past the "wow, I can write what I want and there it is" it's a pretty dull puzzle game with really bad controls, IMO.

Don't 'buy' all three though, because then it will become apparent that Grim is talking crap.

How do I go about 'buying' these games and then being able to play them then? We have a DS but I no longer have enough disposable income to buy the Xbox games I want never mind other platforms. I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good stuff.

Get a second job?

The best picross game I liked on the DS was hidden inside some cheap game called essential sudoku. Should be easy to find with magic money less though with reality cash.

That is good, yes. One of the best pinball games ever made. More 'fun' with the Rumble pak too.

OUENDANNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!

Meteos is my fave DS game.

other quite good ones were the first Kirby one where you drew platforms, Picross and er...

er...

Sega's Touch Darts is good too. The presentation reminds me of Amiga games, but the gameplay is good. Still not managed to finish it though.

Except maybe Civ Revolutions. And Disgaea DS. And Zoo Keeper. And all the Phoenix Wright games.

Elite Beat Agents is better.

CONTROVERSIAL!

But wrong. The music is a matter of taste, but the marker placement is all over the shop in EBA. When it wants to ramp up the difficulty, it just overloads you. Ouendan was more subtle than that.

Etrian Odyssey - superbly hardcore dungeon crawler with great customization. Give your character rude names, draw the map as you go and annotate it rudely.
Shiren The Wanderer - equally hardcore roguelike with quirky humour and random dungeons (top tip: get all the followers if you hope to survive)

Potentially controversial choice is Secret Files Tunguska. Point and click adventure. Everything you ever loved about point and click adventures (illogical puzzles) together with nice graphics and typically bizarre German humour, not to mention the fact the designers were clearly wanking themselves daft over all their fantasies being crammed in (the heroine is a hot Russia redhead motorcycle mechanic who falls in love with a nerdy German scientist chap)

Hmm, top five for me...

Advance Wars Dual Strike - a life-affirming, bonding experience for your generals. Thousands die.
Super Mario Bros 3 - I'm hopeless at this, as I am at all platformers. No disguising quality though, and the mini-games are perfect pass-around fun for when staying over places on hiking hols with your mates.
Phoenix Wright - All soaps and detective shows should examine their writing, characters and story-lines in the light of these games. (Phil Mitchell appears out of nowhere wearing stetson, chewing on beef jerky. Starts assuming one of three poses - 'chuckling happy', 'rubbing forehead confused' and 'teeth grinding angry', complete with 'emotional sound effects')
Professor Layton - "Critical thinking is the key to success. Also this gun. Tell me what you know, bitch my dear."
Elite Beat Agents - "ARE GO!"

The missus is getting thorughly fed up with me answering her questions with "Every puzzle has an answer!", which gives you an idea of how much I love the Professor Layton games. There's 2 more on the way too.

Other DS games I've been playing a lot with my MAGIC MONEY would be:

- GTA: Chinatown Wars - Others have mentioned this mini-masterpiece (which is arguably more fun than it's big brother, GTA IV). My only issue is I can't decide if I prefer the DS or the PSP version.

- Big Bang Mini - I've only played a tiny bit of this so far, but it's a very enjoyable 'make-fireworks-and-ting' game.

- Ketsui: Death Label - get this now people! A horrendously addictive bullet hell schump, with every level essentially being an overblown boss battle. Very, very similar to rRootage.

- Space Invaders Extreme 2 - better than the already awesome original.

- Rhythm Paradise - Rhythm Tengoky Gold, but in English.

I've also played a little bit of Dementium: The Ward and that seemed pretty good. I've SPENT nearly 4GB of MAGIC MONEY on DS games, so there's quite a few in my collection that I've not even touched yet.

I purchased my MAGIC MONEY from Amazon Marketplace, of all places. I bought a well-known brand (Q3 is it? S5? Something in between?) that turned out to be a big dirty fake... but a big dirty fake that seems to work better than the proper ones do for some reason.

Explain!
What with all three of them being practically the same.

I enjoyed EBA, but found Ouendan much more charming and enjoyable. I like to think there's room for all of them on this 'games shelf'.

Now, I would warn against this. The more games you have on your shelf (at least in my experience) the less likely you are to play any of them.

Perhaps we should have a list of categories, and then nominate which game we'd have in said category if we could only have one.

This is a great idea. The luxuriously packed shelf my games are means I too rarely play most of the games I have.

I tend to agree, and have have similar experince of discarding games very quickly because of the amount of others available, although it can sometimes get somewhat muddied with series (advance wars, castlevania, phoenix wrights).

What would be good is having a second 'storage area' for games that you can then later 'move over' to your 'main games shelf'



The original Ouendan, for me, then.

Okay, let's think up some categories and then start a new thread.

My suggestions:
Game to play when you've only got five minutes
Shooting game
Puzzle game
Game to play when you've got a long time
Driving game

EDIT - Oh, not "Game to play while driving".

one puzzle game? you could have a top 10 ds puzzle games and still miss out good ones.

10 people's top 1 puzzle game is probably more valuable that one person's top 10, is I think the point.

Indeed.

This is the beauty of the PSP for me. It's games are a fair bit larger than the DS and I can only fit a few in my fairly large, 8GB 'pockets', therefore meaning I have to carefully select just what from my 'games shelf' I'm going to take with me. In fact, this is pretty much the sole reason I'm playing the DS version of GTA Chinatown Wars as I do feel the PSP version is just that ickle bit better.

So, DS then. For me it goes as thus:

Game to play when you've only got five minutes:
- Professor Layton and Pandora's Box (I'll do a puzzle at a time if I've got a few minutes spare - and Pandora's Box solely because I've finished Curious Village).

Shooting game:
- Ketsui Death Label, with Space Invaders Extreme 2 as a very close runner up. But Ketsui if I can only take one.

Puzzle game:
- Picross DS, having already covered the 'Professor Layton' base.

Game to play when you've got a long time:
- GTA: Chinatown Wars.

Driving game:
- They're all a bit shit on the DS aren't they? GRID seemed OK.

mario kart?!

They were actually just suggestions for categories, but I've not heard of Ketsui Death Label, so good work.

Game to play when you've only got five minutes: Zoo Keeper
Shooting game: Space Invaders Extreme
Puzzle game: Action Loop
Game to play when you've got a long time: GTA Chinatown Wars
Driving game: Mario Kart
Adventure game: Another Code
Strategy game: Advance Wars Dual Strike
Rhythm action/music game: Elite Beat Agents
Platform game: New Super Mario Bros
Sports game: Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games
RPG: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
Best value for MAGIC MONEY game: 42 All-Time Classics

Good catagories, but 'Another Code'? Dear oh dear.

Shall we start a new thread?

It's better than Hotel Dusk.

And aye.

Ta da: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5129

I'll post in the other thread, but I figured here would be a better place to admit I haven't 'purchased' any of the Advance Wars games with my MAGIC MONEY yet.

I really should though. About 17 years or so ago, a school friend gave me a Japanese Gameboy game that someone had bought him because it was entirely in Japanese and he couldn't fathom it out. Turns out this game was Gameboy Wars, and once I'd worked out the gist of it, I was utterly hooked.

What's the best Advance Wars to get started with?

Dual Strike is the most "tutorially".

Or if you've never played any go back and get Advanced Wars 2 for the GBA