When I was twelve years old on September 30th, 1998, Nintendo introduced me to a role-playing game the likes of which I had never seen before: Pokemon Blue for the original Game Boy. Those 150 pixelated monsters gave my brother, sister, and I hours of fun battling, trading, and leveling. Every few years, the company would introduce new features and more monsters until it became apparent that they were “missing” (sales/exposure-wise) a generation of gamers who had never played the originals. Then the remakes started. Nintendo looks at them as a way to introduce new gamers to the older entries in the series. For me, it’s more about reliving the “golden years” of playing the games with my siblings.

Enter the latest entries in the 4th Generation of Pokemon games: Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver for the Nintendo DS.

Remakes of my favorite entries in the series, Pokemon Gold and Silver, the DS editions add most of the “next generation” technical improvements seen in Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum (wireless trading over the Global Trading System, WiFi battles, etc.) while keeping the setting and story from the original titles. Oh, and there’s the bundled Pokewalker accessory.

This handy little pedometer has become the best ‘gimmick’ I’ve seen from Nintendo in ages. By making use of the device’s built-in IR port, you can offload Pokemon on to the Pokewalker. Each step you take makes the monster inside a bit stronger, and every 10 steps or so generates a Watt. You can spend Watts on the Pokewalker itself to use the Poke Radar (allowing you to catch monsters specific to the route you’re walking on) or the Dowsing Machine (a sort of ‘find the item’ game that lets you obtain various medicines and power-ups). Any monsters or items you get will transfer back in to the game when you return from a stroll. Alternatively, you can transfer the Watts back to the DS cartridge without spending them. When you hit certain totals, you open up new routes to walk your Pokemon on. Each route has different items to find and different Pokemon to catch. To make things even more interesting, Pokewalkers can ‘connect’ to each other to share data — every person you connect with each day earns you an item.

Thanks for putting Skinner’s research to good use again, Nintendo.

In all seriousness though, if you like the Pokemon series, you won’t go wrong with the latest remakes. If you’ve never played, try to forget about all of the marketing and merchandise and give it a shot. You might be surprised!

• The unit is covered in a matte finish, as opposed to being glossy
• It’s a little wider and a little thinner than the DS Lite. The build quality is also better.
• It comes with two cameras, a 0.3MP one on the center of the hinge and a 1.3MP one on the top cover
• It has an SD card slot and upgradable firmware!
• Opera is preinstalled
• The screens are larger (3.25 inches as opposed to 3.0 inches), but they run at the same resolution as the older DS models
• It comes with a “DS Shop” application (much like the Wii’s)

So far, the build quality has been fantastic, and the screens are definitely better in terms of color and contrast. My only complaint is that unlike the other DS models, there’s no way to switch the firmware language to English. I’m hoping the homebrew community finds some way to convert Japanese units to north American ones at some point…

With that, here’s a bunch of pictures!

Known in Japan as It’s A Wonderful World, The World Ends With You is a role-playing title from Square-Enix’s Kingdom Hearts development team and Jupiter (known for portable titles like Pokemon Pinball, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and Picross DS).

Anti-social protagonist Neku wakes up in the middle of the busy Shibuya district with no memory and a cryptic warning on his cell phone from “The Reapers”, telling him he has to reach “104” in a specific time limit or “face erasure.” Attacked by strange creatures (called Noise) and baffled that nobody can see or hear him, Neku quickly teams up bubbly Shiki Misaki to combat his attackers and piece together the reasons for his involvement in “The Reaper’s Game.”

Much of The World Ends With You revolves around the game’s unique combat system. Neku can equip various pins that he finds in the game world, each of which grants a specific power or ability. As one fights battles, these pins grow stronger, and can even change into entirely different pins. Neku’s partners, while unable to equip pins, can pull off various combination attacks by navigating through strings of arrows (think Dance, Dance Revolution). This can be fairly overwhelming (not even considering the clothing and food systems, which I’ll cover in a minute), so the game will automatically control your partner for you if you’re not feeling up to the challenge.

The combat itself is as difficult or easy as you make it. You can switch between difficulty settings at any time (Easy mode reduces pin drops and the amount of experience you gain per battle, while Hard and Ultimate modes increase both). There’s also a level/drop rate slider; you can set your level (which determines how many hit points you have) anywhere between one and your current maximum. For each level under the maximum that you set the slider to, your drop rate for pins increases by one. Make the game tougher for yourself and you’ll reap the rewards of additional pins!

Each area of Shibuya has its own brand charts and shops. Clothing purchased from these shops can grant you additional powers, defense, attack, or hit points, and each purchase from a shopkeeper makes them like you a little more. Shopkeepers that like you will offer additional items and be more willing to explain the abilities of the clothes that they sell. The brand charts influence your attacks; wear a popular brand and you’ll find yourself twice as strong as you usually are. Wear a weak brand and watch as your attacks function at 50% effectiveness. You can influence the charts by fighting multiple battles in a single area; fight five or six groups of enemies wearing the worst brand on the chart and you may find that it has moved to the top!

The catch with all of this is your bravery score; each item requires a specific level of bravery to wear it, so even though you may be able to purchase that awesome jacket, you may not be able to wear it until you’ve become brave enough to put it on.

Finally, there’s a food system in place to help you increase your statistics. Every 24 hour period, your characters can eat 24 ‘bytes’ of food. Food has immediate effects when ingested, and after fighting a few battles can be digested for a permanent increase in statistics. Everything from noodles to coffee cakes are available, and you can experiment with different combinations of food to build your character exactly the way you want.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a cool multiplayer minigame called Tim Pin Slammer available. It’s strange cross between paper football and Battling Tops™ that has to be played to be understood, but the basic gist is that you need to use your pins to knock your opponent’s off of a board. By battling with other The World Ends With You players, you’ll improve your pins (just like if you were fighting battles).

For those who like to socialize, there’s a Mingle option built into The World Ends With You. This mode places your DS in a ‘sleep mode’ with the wireless turned on. Every time you encounter another The World Ends With You player in Mingle Mode, you’ll swap ‘character cards’ that allow you to purchase items that player was carrying at any time. You’ll also earn more pin points to help improve your pins. What makes this mode great is that it also works with DS systems that are just using their wireless connections; you can earn pin points from any DS owner you encounter, not just The World Ends With You owners. Additionally, you may randomly gain extra pin points just by being in an area with WiFi signals (from routers, computers, or what have you).

The audio in The World Ends With You is some of the best on the system, being comprised of decent (wow!) J-Pop tunes of all different styles. The 2D visuals are, hands down, the best the Nintendo DS has to offer. It’s obvious that the Kingdom Hearts team was responsible for the title’s art assets; the game oozes color and vibrancy from every pore.

If you’re an RPG lover with a Nintendo DS, The World Ends With You is a must-buy. Rarely do we get a DS title so deep and polished here in the States, and its multitude of features, amazing combat system, compelling story, and fantastic audio and visuals will have you floored the moment you turn the system on. This one’s a keeper for certain.

The fourth entry in the acclaimed Ace Attorney series, Apollo Justice does a bang-up job of continuing the Phoenix Wright legacy. While old fan-favorite characters have made themselves scarce seven years after the end of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, the new cast is nearly (but not quite) as charming and funny as Gumshoe, Edgeworth, and Maya were. A few new gameplay elements and an interesting storyline keep the formula fresh as well.

Some things never change, and Apollo Justice, like the Ace Attorney games before it, is a point-and-click adventure title at heart. Each case introduces you to a crime of some kind (now with upgraded visuals for the DS!) and places the defense of the supposed-perpetrator in your hands. Scour scenes for evidence and interview involved parties to get enough background information to go to court, then cross-examine witnesses and present evidence to get to the truth!

Apollo Justice mixes up the traditional formula a bit with some new additions. Forensic evidence plays a larger role in this game than in the previous ones in the series, and you’ll be able to examine evidence in full 3D. Psych-locks have been removed, replaced with a new “Perceive” system where Apollo can catch people in the act of lying by noticing their nervous habits. In addition, Emma Skye from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney‘s extra fifth case fills in for Detective Gumshoe in Apollo Justice, allowing you to dust evidence for fingerprints, take shoeprints, and conduct other nifty forensic analysis.

While I’m not a huge fan of the new soundtrack, Apollo Justice‘s graphical presentation has been upgraded substantially. Character sprites and environments are substantially more detailed than in previous Ace Attorney titles (which were all ported from the Game Boy Advance to the Nintendo DS for their North American release). The transition from GBA ports to a native DS title might seem subtle at first, but once you see the old 2D diagrams transform into 3D scenes, you know something’s changed for the better.

In the end, Apollo Justice is full of what makes the Ace Attorney series great: hysterical writing (Capcom’s English localization team is fantastic), interesting cases, and entertaining characters. The new additions do a great job at freshening up the series’ forumula, but don’t expect anything drastically different here. If you didn’t like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney or the other games in the series, Apollo Justice won’t change your opinion. That being said, adventure lovers and fans of the series will have a grand time with Ace Attorney‘s latest rookie lawyer.

Plus, you get to yell “OBJECTION!” and point your finger in a menacing fashion at people. How awesome is that?

Review to follow after I’ve finished it!

The Advance Wars series has come a long way since its debut on the Nintendo Entertainment system in August of 1988. Since then, it has expanded across systems with entries on the Game Boy Advance, Gamecube, and Nintendo DS. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is a departure from the series’ generally upbeat nature. The colorful graphics, childish commanding officers, and “we’re playing war!” theme are all gone, replaced with more mature themes. Days of Ruin breaks from the old Wars World storyline of the previous three handheld titles and starts players off in a world ravaged by meteor strikes. With most of humanity annihilated by the strikes, its up to Will (our protagonist) and a small army known as Brenner’s Wolves to rescue survivors, fend off raider attacks, and help maintain peace and order in a scorched wasteland.

The first thing you’ll notice probably about Days of Ruin is its fallout gray color scheme. The artwork here is a lot grittier than in previous Advance Wars titles, but the more realistic look is a breath of fresh air for those who have seen the same icons and landscapes reused over and over again for three titles in a row. Then again, you’ll probably get tired of seeing everything in “blasted wasteland gray” after a dozen levels in the campaign too, so I suppose it works both ways.

Days of Ruin hasn’t done too much to shake up the Advance Wars formula, although there are a few cool new units that help keep everything in balance. The bike acts like a standard infantry unit with increased movement range. Like mech and infantry units, they can also capture properties, making them extremely useful for speedy capture-and-run strikes. You can also use them to great effect by luring units away from an enemy headquarters, then sending in a few bike units to capture it (saving you the trouble of killing off all of the enemy forces.

There’s also a new anti-tank unit that can decimate armored vehicles, an inexpensive duster plane that can attack both air and ground units, a flare tank that can launch flares into the fog of war (revealing enemy units), and a war tank (the strongest and most expensive land unit possible. Sea units get a few newcomers too, adding a gunboat armed with a single-shot missile salvo and a seaplane that can attack anything. One of the coolest new units is the rig, which can not only carry infantry units, but also deploy itself to become a temporary airport or seaport for refueling your vehicles. In addition, there is a new radar property that, when captured, instantly reveals a five-tile wide area around itself.

There’s now a veteran system in place for all units. Any time a unit lands a killing blow on an enemy, it gains a rank (up to III). Each additional rank grants a slight increase to attack and defense. However, ranks only persist through the current battle and are reset any time you start a new map.

CO powers have been drastically cut down in terms of their strength; you’ll no longer be able to win a battle in one fell swoop simply because you had a powerful CO. Now, each CO can be deployed into a vehicle on the battlefield. Once inside, a ‘passive power’ begins to function in a small radius around the CO’s vehicle. This generally improves the attack, defense, or movement ratings of nearby units. Over the course of the battle, you’ll be able to build up and use an ‘active power’. Active powers can do just about anything, from repairing your units to dealing direct damage to enemy forces.

Multiplayer works just like a single player battle except you can play with humans in addition to computer-controlled opponents. There are over 150 maps to choose from on the cartridge alone, amd battles can have anywhere from 2 to 4 players. You can even talk over voice chat with each other, provided everyone you’re playing with has entered your friend code into their roster first. If you’re playing locally instead of over the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, you can play in ‘hotseat’ mode and hand off the DS to each player when their turn comes up.

The map designer is back with a vengeance! In addition to being able to construct new multiplayer maps for local play, you can now upload them to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection and use them for online battles. A rankings system lets you see how popular your map is and Nintendo even selects a ‘recommended’ map each week to display on the front page of the multiplayer hub menu. You have 50 slots available to design and download maps, so even the most diehard map designers should have plenty of space for their creations.

Sadly, even with the addition of all of these new features, Days of Ruin drops the Store found in the other portable Advance Wars titles. Using ‘coins’ gained from your single player battles, you used to be able to unlock new maps and commanding officers for use in multiplayer. Although the store feature will be missed, I think that the addition of internet multiplayer and the map upload/download feature more than makes up for it. Also missing are the ‘dual screen’ battles from Advance Wars: Dual Strike, which displayed parts of the map on both the upper and lower screens of the Nintendo DS.

Although Days of Ruin doesn’t do much to shake up the Advance Wars formula (and actually removes some of the features that improved the replayability of the first three portable titles), the addition of online play and map uploading/downloading via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection more than make up for its shortcomings. The transition to a grittier art style is a breath of fresh air for the series as well. Of particular note are the substantially-less-crazy commanding officer powers, which put the focus back on playing strategically (rather than smothering your opponent in one fell swoop with an overpowered CO ability). Any turn-based strategy fan would be happy to have Advance Wars: Days of Ruin in their DS library!

If anyone picks the game up and wants to play online with me, my friend code is:

536998
288001

SimCity DS was supposed to feel like a remake of SimCity 3000 (arguably the most fun in the series); instead, it feels like SimCity 2000 with the crummy parts of SimCity 3000 tacked on. While the game replicates the feel of the SimCity series well enough, there are a number of fun-crushing omissions. You can’t enact ordinances (possibly the most entertaining part of being mayor), there’s no variation to the terrain (no mountains or valleys, just flat plains with some water), trading between other cities doesn’t exist (because as far as I can tell, there are no other ‘neighboring’ cities), and you can only ‘run’ one city at once. If you want to start a new one, you need to delete the old city. To top things off, they neglected to add user-triggerable disasters! Who didn’t enjoy wreaking havoc on their bustling metropolis with various natural disasters and UFOs? Sorry, you can’t activate disasters in SimCity DS.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on SimCity DS. If you really, really like the SimCity series, you’ll probably have fun with it’s portable incarnation. At least it gets the basics down, and the touch screen interface was put together pretty well. Mediocre at best.

Planet Puzzle League is the latest in a line of Panel de Pon/Puzzle League spinoffs, preceeded by Tetris Attack! on the Super Nintendo, and the Pokemon Puzzle League series on the Game Boy Advance and GameCube. The basic gist is that it’s a visual matching game. A playing field 6 tiles wide and 12 tiles tall sits on the right/lower screen. You can play vertically a la Brain Age/Hotel Dusk: Room 215 or horizontally like most other DS games. Tiles with various colors and shapes on the will rise from the bottom of the screen. You can drag tiles sideways in a row, but not vertically. Match three or more in a row, horizontally or vertically, and they’ll vanish. Expanding on this by creating chains (tiles can fall when you clear tiles below them, clearing even more tiles of you line them up right) and combos (clear more than three at once) will boost your score. If the blocks ever reach over the top of the playing field, you lose.

If my description wasn’t terribly clear, just visit the Wikipedia article.

The real lure of Planet Puzzle League comes from its wide variety of gameplay modes. You can play online in Novice (only until you win a certain number of times online, after that, only if you lose a bunch of games in a row), Free Play (unranked casual matches), or Birthday (ranked, only VS. people who share your birthday) modes against other players. The catch in multiplayer is that clearing more than three tiles at once, or making long chains/combos will send “garbage blocks” to your opponent’s screen. Clearing tiles touching these garbage blocks will turn the garbage into actual tiles you can manipulate. Single player has Endless, Time Attack (score as high as you can in the alloted time), Puzzle (clear the screen given a certain number/pattern of tiles), and VS. Computer modes, along with a Brain Age-like “Daily Play” system that tracks your progress in three modes you can only play once every day (Endless, Line Clear, and Garbage Clear). The system will chart your daily play progress on a graph so you can see how much you’ve improved over time! If you like puzzle titles, it trumps the extremely enjoyable Meteos. An essential buy.

-Kyle