Or is it “R4tw”? Anyway… When I haven’t been busting my ass at my new job, my time lately has been spent hanging out with the wife & kid, sleeping, or playing around with any given game on the R4DS. Inspired by ruumis‘s microreviews that he posted a while ago, I thought I would post a few of my own. However, each of these are games that I have tried and exclusively not enjoyed. There is a lot that I have enjoyed playing, but I always find it more enlightening to talk about the bad rather than the good. I’ll save some of the good for another post.
Daigasso! Band Brothers (J) – Also known as “Jam With the Band”. Ever since this title came out in Japan, I have wanted to give it a shot. I’m a big rhythm/music game fan, so this one seemed like a no-brainer. *BZZZZT* Oh how painfully, painfully wrong I was. First of all, the language barrier is horrible in this game. There could be tons of options that this game has which potentially make it not suck, but damned if I can find them. Half of the audio in this game is actually English, and this game has to go against the grain and make all of their menus in Japanese only? Still, the language barrier is only the initial frustration. The worst part is the actual gameplay. As the song plays, you have to hit either a direction on the d-pad or one of the YXBA buttons as appropriate. But that’s it! It doesn’t matter which direction you hit on the d-pad, as long as you hit the d-pad when the blue marker comes into the target zone. And you can hit any of the 4 buttons on the right when the time comes for those and the red marker is “active”. Are you kidding me? I know we’re using the DS as a platform here people, but at least games like FreQuency & Amplitude used three buttons, had usable powerups, required you to switch tracks while you played and came with much better music.
Devilish (E) – It’s like Breakout, but without the fun. You try and make your way through a level that looks like a castle, filled with skeletons and treasure chests, bouncing a ball off a floating paddle to clear the way. Oh, and the paddle can separate vertically, where at the bottom of the lower screen is, in essence, your “backup paddle” while you can push your front paddle damn near all the way to the top of the upper screen and annihilate everything. Would be completely forgettable if it hadn’t been so bad.
Konductra (U) – A puzzler that wants you to drop 2×1 pieces onto a rectangular playing field and continue to try and match the same colors next to each other until you choose to clear them from the playing field. You “conduct” electricity through pieces of a like color (occasionally able to cross colors through connector blocks) to remove them from the playing field, at which point you keep dropping pieces onto the field and do it all over again. Totally boring, does not get nearly up to speed fast enough if you are good at the game (Tetris masters don’t have to wait long to get up to speed by starting at Level 1… Konductra masters would age 5 years before the game got fast enough for them), and just about the only thing I saw done right was allowing players to “sign” their name onto the high score list (why do more DS games not allow for this bit of customization? It really was kind of a nice touch). Oh, and in line with the game’s theme of dragging your stylus through the blocks while “connecting” them for removal, each and every menu option requires you to drag the stylus across all the letters in the name rather than just letting you click it. That “feature” almost prevented me from playing the game entirely since I couldn’t figure out how to get away from the title screen (which looking back at it, may not have been the worst thing in the world to have happened).
Mini RC Rally (U) – If you’re looking to re-live the good times had by playing R.C. Pro-Am on the NES, go fire up an emulator or hook up the old system to play the real deal. Sluggish menus, a race car that doesn’t want to move (I couldn’t win the very first race, trying 3 times, and there was not a tutorial to be found on how to play if I was doing something wrong. Did my RC car have a stickshift I didn’t know about and I was stuck in 1st gear?) Throw in horrible blocking objects that exist nowhere near the drawn object on the track (getting stuck on a soda can nearly a full car’s width AWAY from said soda can is never fun) and this one is one to avoid at all costs.
Ys Strategy (E) – I have never played the other Ys titles that exist, but I have heard good things about them. Ys Strategy, on the other hand, I would not add to the list of quality Ys games. Shoddy controls, slow pacing off the bat, and while this game may have gotten better if I sat down with it longer, it lost my attention quickly. I’d be much faster to recommend A Touch of War from the homebrew scene than this production piece. AToW doesn’t even have any in-game instructions yet still somehow manages to be more fun (not to mention the graphics are better).
Sudoku Mania (U) – How did this game make it to market? This as well as the recently released Essential Sudoku DS (E) are two of the worst stabs at Sudoku that possibly could have been made. Sudoku Mania gives you “options” in the sense that you can change the background on the level you play. Are you kidding me? No difficulty options, a terrible handwriting recognition engine (how hard is it, really, for these companies to program something than can recognize all of NINE digits properly?!?) and this one got quickly kicked to the curb. I think that to this day you are still best off turning to Brain Age for the most enjoyable Sudoku experience on the DS yet.
World Championship Poker (U) – Wow, you must really like poker to put up with playing this garbage. The premise starts off almost akin to Drug/Dope Wars… here’s some money, go make some cash so you can pay off your loan and get rich. While I will say that at least WCP doesn’t just offer up Texas Hold ‘Em, unfortunately the gameplay is too slow for it to be any fun. The camera during the game sits in the middle of the table and turns to each person (a la the “basement” scenes from That 70′s Show) when the action is on them. At which point the game feels the need to play some little animation with the person saying something before they act. “Boy, you really got me there.” Yeah, great, that’s nice. Shut the hell up and put your money in or don’t. The worst part of all that tripe is that you’re forced to sit through it even when you’re already out of a hand! If you fold pre-flop for a few hands in a row while playing Hold ‘Em with your buddies, you may not overly mind. You can talk with your friends, go grab a drink, whatever. This game forces you to sit there while grandma (I wish I was kidding) goes on about how she doesn’t think she’s going to win this hand before putting $3,000 in the pot.
There is a lot to enjoy about owning an R4, but perhaps the worst part of owning one is the ease with which you can access all of the piss-poor games that have been made. I can’t even speak to the amount of time in my life that has been wasted by subjecting myself to these games. Even when I really, really try and give them a chance, I just end up disappointed anyway – so there’s a good handful of hours down the toilet.
