Ninjatown - Nintendo DS

I went to my first gaming convention last weekend. It was PAX East in Boston and I met some nice folks, played great games and spent too much on food and cocktails. I had a blast and am looking forward to my next convention. While I was there I met a lot of industry folks I know but have never met in person. All my gaming coverage for the newspaper stems from e-mailing contacts all over the world (though mostly on the West Coast). There are probably 100 people I speak to via e-mail frequently but couldn't pick out of a lineup. I met a few of them in Boston and made some new contacts as well. The one guy I was most looking forward to meeting was Rob from Sandbox Strategies. Rob's a Rhode Island guy working in New York. He's a family man and a gamer of a certain age (that age would be close to mine). This all means he's a fan of games, a real fan. He can talk about the classics as easily as the newer titles and he takes none of it too seriously.
We had dinner and talked about our mutual passion and the one game he kept mentioning was something called Ninjatown for the DS.
Ninjatown is a tower defense game published by SouthPeak Interactive. It has a cute and fuzzy exterior that belies the serious game hiding beneath. There are sunny skies, lush forest and rolling hills in the land of Ninjatown where adorable and honorable Ninjas live. After the mysterious eruption of a nearby volcano, Ninjatown is attacked by hordes of sinister enemies lead by Mr. Demon, who, of course, is bent on destruction.
In a classic yet inventive take on the genre you will build armies to beat back the large variety of Mr. Demon's minions. I'm not keen on blowing into the microphone of my snazzy DSiXL (it's a loaner from Nintendo) but I did so with abandon when prompted to by the game. I also yelled into the microphone to activate a special attack, something I find hard to explain to my wife who already thinks I'm a little crackers when it comes to the whole gaming thing.
Fans of the tower defense genre should absolutely be playing this game right now. Despite great reviews this sleeper title wasn't on the lips of anyone I was talking to at the convention.
Except for Rob, that is.
There were plenty of other games he could have been trying to sell me on that night but he kept coming back to Ninjatown. It is by far my best memory of the weekend – talking shop with a guy who cares – and it's currently the only game I want to be playing. Seeing how I have yet to defeat God of War II or Just Cause II, that's saying something.
There's another game Rob mentioned a lot over the weekend, and that game is Shaq Fu for the Sega Genesis. He claims he's going to write a blog entry about it for me soon.
Well Rob, the clock is ticking . . .
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Scribblenauts - Nintendo DS

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time engaged in one of the greatest debates in all of childhood: Who would win in a fight?
Superman or The Hulk?
The Hulk.
Godzilla or a T-Rex?
Godzilla
My dad or your dad?
My dad.
You get the idea. My next-door-neighbor and I would waste summer afternoons in our Baltimore suburb playing this silly game before we got bored and, of course, got into mischief. (Later in life I killed some time by throwing a tub of BBQ sauce at some dude's garage. I'm ashamed to say how old I was at the time. Let's just say I almost missed the prom because I was grounded.)
Perhaps kids of this generation will be spared the shame of youth with Scribblenauts, a game that lets you do almost anything in its virtual world. If you want to see if God is more powerful than Godzilla, go for it. If you want to see if a vampire can beat a wolfman, have at it. This is not the purpose of the game, however, but it's a plus.
The goal of this ingenious game is simple: Help Maxwell (you) solve challenge after challenge in a game world that you control. The trick here is that you choose what to put in the game world to help complete each task. For instance, let’s say there is a challenge in which you have to rescue a kitten from a tree. Using the Nintendo DS touch screen to insert objects into the game world, you could arm yourself with a hatchet and chop the tree down. Or you could write in a fireman and let him do the work for you. Or you could get a little nasty and use a slingshot to shoot the cat out of the tree (although points are awarded for avoiding violence).
The challenges in Scribblenauts range from the simple cat-caught-in-tree example to helping sea captains avoid ice bergs.
If you can think it, you can probably write it into the game world. The game recognizes some 10,000 words and translates them into characters and objects. And if you don’t feel like a challenge, you can simply write goofy stuff into the game world and see how they interact. I recommend the following: God and Satan; a vampire and garlic; a cop and a crook; Bigfoot and a dragon.
This is easily one of the best games I’ve played on my DS. If I would have had a game like this when I was young, perhaps I wouldn't have been so easily distracted and some poor man's garage door wouldn't smell like ribs.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com

Retro Game Challenge - Nintendo DS

An 80s love letter to retro gamers and anyone who likes a challenge, Retro Game Challenge was a delightful surprise. When you use words like “sweet” or “thoughtful” to describe a video game it’s usually for titles that feature ponies or Italian plumbers who save princesses. When talking about XSEED’s Retro Gaming Challenge, these words refer to the game’s personality and sensibilities as much as its characters.
It may be because I’m a child of the Atari 2600 and NES, but I found the overall attitude of this game refreshingly warm and thoughtful. It is a power ballad written to 8-bit gamers like myself who long for the days when high scores were everything and extra lives made a difference.
Older gamers often defend the early games for their brilliant use of innovative gameplay in the absence of mindblowing graphics and memory. We say those things, then we let our NES and Genesis gather dust in the shadow of our new consoles. We may miss the simplicity of game’s past, but we rarely go back and visit them. That’s where Retro Gaming Challenge is brilliant. Instead of licensing a bunch of 8-bit classics and bundling them with a goofy storyline, XSEED has managed to produce faithful – and deep – clones of classic 8-bit genres and presented them in a compelling way that begs to be played.
Retro Game Challenge is based on the original Japanese TV series, Retro Game Master. The game takes you back to the 1980s, where you play as a young boy forced by the evil “Game Master” Arino to test your gaming skills in a variety of retro-style video games including shooters, racing games, platformers and an epic role-playing game. Once you master Arino’s challenges, you can return to the beginning to play any of the eight games in their entirety.
The interface – which has you sitting in front of a TV and picking games (and magazines filled with cheats and tips) from the living room bookshelf – is cool and nostalgic. The in-game magazines provide cheat codes to help you warp through complicated levels, but they also offer a virtual history lesson on the video game industry. The fake ‘80s news stories cover actual trends and milestones in the industry from the ‘80s, including the meteoric rise and fall of new game releases.
It is the clever presentation and the game’s ability to take you back in time to your misspent youth jamming cartridges into a game console that sets the game apart from the simple retro release compilation games.
But it’s all about the games in the end. If they were no fun to play, the charm would wear thin quickly. Luckily, the games are fun and the charm doesn’t fade.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com