July 04, 2005

Touched and Gone

I was the lucky recipient of Nintendo’s Yoshi Touch and Go for the DS for my birthday. Best DS game so far, though there are others I’m looking forward to!

Yoshi is great. It’s got the trademark Nintendo sense of playfulness down perfectly, great integration with the touch-screen (the game is played entirely by using the pen), and microphone, and the usual catchy music (also somehow indefinably Nintendo). Complaints that the game is essentially one huge level, a level that you only get one life per game to explore, are, in a sense, valid. As is complaining your ice-cream is cold. I mean, if you don’t like sand between your toes, why do you go to the beach?

Rumour has it that the DS is outselling the PSP quite heavily, and that DS owners are buying far more games per head than PSP owners. The current lack of compelling new PSP titles is probably a factor, but I wonder if perhaps Kutaragi-san & co. are sitting in the Sony Orbiting HQ wondering if they mis-judged the portable gaming market slightly…

Posted by Oliver at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2005

MOST. EXCITING. GAMING. NEWS. EVER.

For those of you who can only interpret the following as gibberish, I do apologise. You may want to try somebody more coherent. Try Dervala, she’s got coherency down pat.

ACK! GOLLOP BROTHERS! LASER SQUAD! LORDS OF CHAOS! BEST STRATEGY GAMES EVER! 8-BIT WONDERS! CLASSIC CHILDHOOD GAMING! NOW COMING TO GAMEBOY ADVANCE! REBELSTAR TACTICAL COMMAND!

From Namco, too. Who’d have thought it?

I think I need a bit of a lie-down. Should I explain to the non-cognoscenti? I don’t think I’ll bother. At least not until August, when you can actually buy the game in the shops… In the interim, you can read what I and some other excited obsessives think here and here. I’m the one getting very excited behind the ‘Horse’ handle.

Posted by Oliver at 11:52 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 17, 2005

I'm naming my first child Yoshi

The Nintendo’s DS launched here last week, and I would have been first in line to buy one, if I hadn’t already imported one from the US before Christmas.

A brief rundown for the poorly-informed: the DS is Nintendo’s latest handheld console, about as powerful as Nintendo’s home console was about four years ago. It has two screens, the bottom one of which is a touch-screen. If you’ve ever used a personal data assistant you’ll be able to imagine the use of this in games pretty quickly; if not, a dinky pen or careful finger lets you touch the game objects directly on screen, and have them respond.

Given the ton of gaming hardware I have in my house, why on earth would I buy a DS? Because the new interface is a fantastic thing. It lets just about anyone intuitively play games on the system without needing to jump through the mental hoops required to translate joypad movements into on-screen action. That joypad, staple of console-gaming since its inception, has been a barrier to universal pick-up-and-play gaming no matter how ergonomically they build them.

They have this new, digital version of crack cocaine out now, called Zookeeper; if by chance you buy it, keep your significant other away from it or you’ll never see your DS again. It’s the perfect example of the direct manipulation touch-screen majesty you’re not going to get on any other console. Drag pieces into place to make them disappear. Playing it for five minutes is enough for your subconscious seize on it like some maddening pop tune.

Yes, I know about Sony’s Playstation Portable. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware (ignoring the poor battery life), but I’ve played many games during my short time on this earth, and I don’t see the PSP giving me that sense of a new gaming experience the DS with its touch screen has. The PSP will have its great games, but they’ll be games that could have as easily appeared on any recent home console - or even on the DS itself.

Every PDA maker ever should be kicking themselves for not turning out a few innovative touch screen games sooner. I cannot wait for Yoshi: Touch and Go.

Disclaimer for the gaming hardcore: yes, the DS has other great features: wireless multiplayer, gameboy advance compatibility (and GBA games will look better on the DS), good 3D performance, blah blah blah. Such features are pretty much required of any new portable console at this stage. Without the touchscreen the DS would just be an under-specced, ungainly rendition of the PSP. With it, a whole new way of designing and playing games becomes possible; required, even.

Posted by Oliver at 05:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 05, 2005

Former big fish in small pond syndrome

"You can never go back, and it hurts to try" is my new motto. This is after discovering that the tetris clone I was so bloody thrilled about finding is, in fact:

I don't know why I didn't notice it before, but it's possible to position two blocks in one square. Clearly this violates the laws of both physics and tetris. And if you do this, you're in with a good chance of screwing yourself. Two blocks fall twice as far, apparently, and if one falls off the playing area there's no way to clear it. Even the super-duper Six In A Row of the Same Colour move (that usually clears all the blocks of that colour, complete with a nice whooshy sound) can't reach blocks outside the play area. So the tile count never reaches zero, and the level never ends.

It's like re-discovering a long lost old friend, only to find out they were actually some alien life form pretending to be human, and all those laughs you had were just to harvest laugh hormones to sell on an alien laugh hormones black market. Stupid aliens. Still, it was worth it: my sweetheart has a copy of the original Tetris 2 on the Gameboy! And she's got a bit of a thing for games too. Not nearly as much as me, of course, as I'm downright unhealthy about them. But even so: Aw.

Posted by Oliver at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2005

Renewing old friendships

Friends who knew me in UCD will know that I was a pretty poor student at the best of times, spending far too long working on college newspapers, among other things. And those who knew me from working on college newspapers will know I spent far too long hogging the main design mac, playing a little gem called Tetris Plus.

Yup, that's a working hyperlink. God help me, it's found me again. And it's brilliant. Now, I'm at least five years older, and not a huge fan of retro-gaming, but hearing that music again made me shiver. My brain immediately knew what to do, but my clumsy fingers couldn't translate knowing into keypresses quickly enough. Still, made it to level 15 with 23568 points; not a bad showing after a break of five years.

Apparently, Tetris Plus is an 'interpretation' of Tetris 2, but a solid two minutes of research via Google couldn't get a decent description of how Tetris 2 played, so it's hard to say. The gameplay is deeper than that of Tetris - you can break up the pieces, gravity plays a part, and you've to align three or more squares of the same colour, not complete lines - which is off-putting to alot of Tetris traditionalists. But I get bored of Tetris quite quickly whereas this little beauty is that bit more involving.

If you fancy a go, remember that the above file will only work on Apple computers. I would seriously consider buying a Mac Mini to play this game. What? I want one is all. I want everyone to have one.

I held the college newspaper office record for three solid months before some blow-in got pissed off trying to reach it and deleted the high-scores. Hmmm. Maybe my dogged focus on holding every ranking in the high score table was to blame...

Posted by Oliver at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)