Pages
Recent Posts
- The highs and lows of my 2010 gaming year
- Not everything it was Crackdown 2′ed to be…
- Playing Splinter Cell with Conviction
- Crackdown 2 demo out
- Save the Arcades 2!
- Happy 30th Pac Man!
- Wii games that are actually worth playing
- Make a run for the Borderlands
- Fall 2009 Xbox dashboard update preview bugaloo
- Off the edge with Baja
- Unleashing the Force in your living room
- Godfather II, Another Game You Can’t Refuse
- DS games that are actually worth playing
- Wanted: A Game Based on a Movie that Doesn’t Suck
- This must be just like living in Burnout Paradise
Categories
- Arcade (2)
- General (1)
- iPhone (1)
- Mac (1)
- NES (2)
- Nintendo DS (5)
- PC (8)
- Playstation 2 (1)
- Playstation 3 (8)
- PSP (1)
- Wii (3)
- Xbox 360 (17)
Archives
- January 2011 (2)
- October 2010 (1)
- June 2010 (1)
- May 2010 (4)
- October 2009 (2)
- August 2009 (1)
- July 2009 (4)
- June 2009 (3)
- May 2009 (1)
- March 2009 (1)
- February 2009 (1)
- January 2009 (1)
- December 2008 (3)
- The best soundbars to boost your TV audio in 2024
- iFixit’s teardown of the new M4 iPad Pro reveals an easier-to-replace battery
- Sam Altman is ‘embarrassed’ that OpenAI threatened to revoke equity if exiting employees wouldn’t sign an NDA
- Slack has been using data from your chats to train its machine learning models
- Blue Origin successfully sends tourists to the edge of space again after a long hiatus
- Indie developers are trying to make horse games that don’t suck. It’s not easy
- Apple will reportedly offer higher trade-in credit for old iPhones for the next two weeks
- New trailer for Dead Cells: Immortalis gives us a first real look at the animated series
- Beats headphones and earbuds with AppleCare+ are on sale at Amazon
- X-Men ‘97 didn’t have to go that hard
- Meijer - $20 (20k mperks points) off $50+ PSN/Xbox credit thru 11/25
- Eneba: $99 Nintendo eShop Gift Card (Digital Delivery) $85, $50 PSN eGift Card $43
- Xbox Game Pass Ultimate: 3 Month Membership $28 (Also $100 Amazon Gift Card $94)
- GameFly Black Friday sale is live - FF16 $30, AC VI $35, Jedi Survivor $25
- $70 Xbox/Microsoft Gift Card (Digital Delivery) - $59 (Can be used to buy Xbox/Microsoft hardware too)
Meta
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
DS games that are actually worth playing
21st July 2009
The Nintendo DS is certainly prone to a slew of developers just putting out crap for them to say they have a title out. Thus, with the DS (and the Wii) there are so few games actually worth trying out. Some feel as good (bad) as a flash game port. Often, 1st party games end up being the safe bet, and they are usually the highest quality. Quality of course is completely personal opinion and experience. In my experiences, the games below for the DS are a “safe bet” when starting your collection or looking for something new to try.
So here it goes in extreme summary mode, in no particular order:
New Super Mario Bros – brings back classic NES action, new layout, combo 2d/3d look
Mario Kart DS – great action similar to the Gamecube version, 4 players off one card
Kirby Canvas Curse – best use of the touchscreen I’ve seen yet, one of my lasting faves
Puzzle Quest – think Bejeweled with RPG elements
Animal Crossing – more kiddish, but it’s a casual fun game, can make up to 4 chars
Professor Layton’s Curious Village – one of the hardest games I’ve played, 300+puzzles
N+ – very simple 2d ninja level hopping puzzle game, works great with d-pad controls
Rune Factory - do farming and adventure RPG, etc. Think Animal Crossing meets Zelda
SimCity - PC classic ported to the DS, hours of city building
Kung Fu Panda – yes, it’s a total movie sellout, but I had fun with it
Space Invaders Extreme – awesome redo of this game, play against people over wifi/inet
Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword – book style play, all stylus no buttons, amazingly difficult
Elite Beat Agents – fun rhythm based game, all touchscreen
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles – RPG game, I found it lots of fun
Nanostray - impossibly hard spaceship shooter, good challenge though
Geometry Wars: Galaxies – great use of d-pad and touchpad, always entertaining
Peggle Dual Shot – eliminate all the pegs with a set number of balls, good physics
Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars – classic GTA action in your hand, lots of replay value
Hrm, guess that’s about it. I’ve played many others, but these are the cream of the crop in my opinion. I usually get all my DS games used at Gamestop, Game Trader, Craigslist or off Goozex. Another great resource is Cheap Ass Gamer, which keeps track of the deals and sales all around.
- Ben Mazhary-Clark
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Nice list, I found some I have not played yet.
Comment by NWGeek — July 25, 2009 @ 9:09 pm
To be honest, not keen on most of those, but you can never go wrong with Mario Kart!
Comment by HALO ODST FTW! — September 21, 2009 @ 8:22 am
One I recently got addicted to that wasn’t on the list:
Retro Game Challenge
Play as a kid sent back in time to the 8-bit days to take on challenges in old games by a evil Gamemaster. It’s pretty awesome action, especially if you favor the older NES generation of games. Lots of individual games within the game itself to keep the spice of life up in this title. Recommended!
–ben
Comment by virtualdev — October 8, 2009 @ 2:07 pm