Wii U, 3DS, Wii, DS, DSi, WiiWare, DSiWare, Virtual Console Reviews - Page 33

Together at last

Say what you will about the rest of the game, one thing Bugs'N'Balls gets exactly right is its title. It has bugs, and they are indeed armed with balls. The question is this: do bugs and balls go together like peanut butter and jelly, or is it more like oil and water? Let's just say it's peanut butter jelly time. Bugs'N'Balls is excellent fun in short bursts, and it comes with an..

101 reasons to avoid this

One hundred and one games. It's a tempting proposition isn't it? It's unlikely that as an average consumer you will play, let alone purchase, one hundred and one games in a whole year, so when Nordcurrent comes a-knockin' at your door and offers you exactly that many titles for the low, low price of 700 Points, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a Billy Bargain. But when..

Monochrome Mario is back in style

Nintendo managed to squeeze quite a bit of the Super Mario experience into the original Super Mario Land, but many gamers felt like the game was a bit too scaled down to feel like a true adventure from the series. Nintendo obviously sensed this when they sat down to create Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, as this...

Uninspired, but not broken

Strategy games come in many forms, but these days, subgenres like tower defence and resource management are far more commonplace than your traditional turn-based affairs. Break Tactics helps fill the void, and while it's a fine entry in the category, it doesn't innovate much either. The game is reminiscent of Chess and a...

Rage against the machine (gun)

Multiplayer has been a mainstay in first person shooters since only a few years after the genre's formal debut. Nonetheless, PC gamers had been shooting each other either in LAN setups or online for many years before console FPSes got in on the act. It wasn't until GoldenEye 007 hit the N64 that the idea of getting...

This cuts it

There has been much debate in gaming circles about Nintendo’s digital offerings and the competition from smartphones and tablets. Now one of the biggest hits from those rival platforms, Cut the Rope, has finally arrived on DSiWare. The question is, does this title succeed on the DSi, or does it miss out on the candy? The premise of...

Escape while you still can

Escape Trick: Ninja Castle is the second game in the Escape Trick series that we've seen here at Nintendo Life. The first game, Escape Trick: The Secret of Rock City Prison, failed to really grab us: its ambition was laudable, but its execution consisted of dull visuals, underwhelming gameplay, and nonsensical puzzle...

Bee very grateful for this one

Most of our readers could be forgiven for never having played TwinBee: after all, it began life in 1985 as an arcade game that never left Japan. It was later ported to the Famicom, and though some reports state that an NES localisation project was actually completed, for some reason it was never released. In fact,...

Fair-ebellum

Brains – we've all got 'em, and up until 2006, many thought that video games would rot 'em. That's when a certain Dr. Kawashima came on the DS scene with his Brain Age training game and showed people, with the help of some (since called into question) science, that with simple math problems and puzzles intended to exercise different areas of thought, you could keep in good mental..

Don't touch this

When a genre of game saturates a market it's fair to expect that any new title coming out within that style of play must do a good impression of the leaders in the field, in the very least aping what made the forerunners successful, hopefully providing an interesting alternative. As the number of first person shooters, mini-game...

Middle of the road

Many games take the history of Asian nations as their focus, from the Japanese combat-based Samurai Warriors series to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, which use the warring kingdoms of first-century China as their basis. The newest to enter the ring is Defense of the Middle Kingdom, which also focuses on the latter's subject matter, putting a tower defence spin on the..

Joker's wild

When Enix released the original Dragon Quest Monsters for Game Boy back in 1998, many quickly dismissed it as just another vain attempt to cash in on the Pokémon craze. But over the past 13 years, the Monsters series has developed quite a following and become more in-depth and multiplayer-friendly with each new release. Where the first Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker on DS introduced a..

Ten for the price of one

It's no secret that Kirby has been a huge part of Nintendo's portable systems over the years, even making his debut on the original Game Boy back in 1992. When Kirby Canvas Curse was released, it took the traditional button controls away and replaced them with the touchscreen controls of the DS. While some die-hard fans of...

Stuck in neutral

Driving and racing games have, so far, been relatively well represented on the 3DS in its early lifespan, with Ridge Racer 3D and Asphalt 3D competing for the affections of driving fans. Ubisoft has now joined in with Driver Renegade 3D, an exclusive title in the franchise for the handheld. Does it provide a high-octane adrenaline rush, or crash off the road? To avoid any..

In pole position

If there's one letter of the alphabet that, when included at the end of a title should instantly tell you not to buy that game, it's the letter “z”. The quality of a product with a name that has the linguistic audacity to inappropriately replace the sensual sweeps of a sexily shaped "s", is for the most part awful: just see the Petz, Babyz and Horsez titles as..

Great Britain, average game

Is it OK to be competent? Is it OK, not to excel, not to push the boundaries, but just to be totally fine? It's fair to say that we all want this medium to drive forward and provide us an experience you can't find elsewhere, but when a product doesn't claim to be groundbreaking should we really expect a revolution in game design? Probably not, which is what Nordic Games..

A blast, easel-y

Painting is a lot of fun, and as it happens, it's even more fun with a group. Why it's taken so long for a game studio to realise this is beyond us – and it was beyond the man behind Paint Splash and father of three, Uffe Flarup, as well. That's why he created Kidspaint, a homebrew application that let families everywhere enjoy creating art together. Now, after more than 50,000..

BIT.TRIP for your trip

It's impossible to deny just how successful Gaijin Games has been at capturing the old-school flavor of video games from our past and their ability to mould those sensibilities with modern technology. Their BIT.TRIP series has spawned some of the most popular downloads available on WiiWare and is now making a go at retail...

Slightly less than mega

Back when the Mega Man franchise started with the release of the original NES game, Capcom never thought it would do well — the first game was expected to bomb horribly, as almost nobody at the famous developer thought people would like it. Fast forward to today, and Mega Man has become one of their best-known franchises...