Robot Claw

This past week, Nintendo removed the Nintendo DS from it’s future sales projections. This is as good a sign as any from them that the system has been ‘retired’ and is likely no longer being produced. Although it is still in stores (and selling respectably, at least in America), it is likely that by the end of this year it will be completed replaced by the 3DS.

The DS was released back in 2004. Upon launch, it was an ugly duckling, especially compared to the then reigning handheld, the Gameboy Advance SP. This is what the DS looked like when it was first released:

On the day of US release, November 21 2004, I bought two systems (one for KLS), and one game. The game was Super Mario DS, a rerelease of the Gamecube classic. I hadn’t played it in years, and enjoyed playing it again on the DS. But there was no question, in those early six months or so, that this was a troubled system.

After about a year though, the games started coming out at a good pace, and some system classics were released early in the lifespan. This included Castlevania and Advance Wars games (the latter still without a sequel…), and Animal Crossing and the ‘games’ that would skyrocket the system to popularity: Nintendogs and Brain Age.

Back then – in mid 2006 – the system could do no wrong. It was the most successful game system of all time, raking in massive profits for Nintendo and with developers lining up to put games on it. This was the start of the golden years for DS; what would perhaps be the best years of any game system.

I liked the DS from the start, but by the time developers had gotten their minds around the system and fully fledged games (as opposed to two-screen inflated demos) started coming out it had become perhaps my favourite system of all time. One after another, fantastic games were being released. I bought them all; I played them all.

The system went through a few iterations: DS Lite, DSi, DSiXL. I bought them all, and to this day own 6 different DS systems. I took advantage of the lack of regional lockouts and bought games in the US, Australia, England and Japan, and own more foreign software for the DS than for any other system. I was buying games for it at a rate of almost 3 per month, and for many years it dominated my game time.

To date, Nintendo has sold 153 million DS units, and 933 million units of software have been sold. That’s an average of a little over 6 per owner. This number seems alarmingly small to me, since I own 261 different DS games, and couldn’t begin to imagine how to distill my collection down to only 6 ‘must-haves’.

But I shall try. In no particular order then, my six favourite Nintendo DS games:

Elite Beat Agents – the best music game ever made, hands down. This was based on the Japanese original, Ossu Tatakae Ouenden, itself a magnificent game (as it its sequel). But this English language all-new installment is the best of the series.

The World Ends With You – Incredibly hardcore and detail-oriented RPG set in Shibuya, Japan featuring a mind-bending story, fantastic music and one of the best combat engines ever made. It’s available on iOS, but the long-rumoured sequel is MIA.

Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City – Impossibly, the ‘wizardry’ game type was resurrected on the DS to great success. I could have probably filled this list with six such games (including Dark Spire, Wizardry Asterisk, several Shin Megami Tensei games etc.) but the one series to rule them all is Etrian Odyssey. The best DS installment was the third, but I’m glad to say the series is going strong and the fourth game, recently released on the 3DS, is on my shelf waiting to be played 🙂

Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier – Yes I know you’ve never heard of this unlikely spin-off from a series that will never be released outside of Japan due to copyright hell. But this was a fantastic and very lighthearted traditional RPG with a great story, incredible 2D animation and some really striking character designs. I loved it to death, and wish Atlus would release the sequel! (Incidentally this game was released in very limited quantities and is a pricey collectible now.)

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels Of The Starry Skies – Hundreds of hours of gameplay and oodles of dungeons to explore, bosses to kill and loot to collect make this perhaps the best traditional RPG on the system.

Animal Crossing: Wild World – The best Animal Crossing yet (well…) came out early in the DS’s life. I played it daily for almost a year 🙂

All told, I own just shy of 1400 games for 26 different systems. It’s remarkable that almost 20% of those games are for only one of the 26 systems. The DS may be discontinued now, but I don’t doubt I’ll still be buying games for it in the years to come, and I don’t doubt that I’ll still be playing DS games for many, many years 🙂

Amongst other things, I got this game for my birthday:

It’s the third of the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames released in the past few years. I’ve read almost every one of the the Drizzt novels, so I was interested to see how this game worked out. Of course the fact it can be solo played only made it more interesting…

It took some time to get it ready for play. There are a lot of tokens to punch out of 15 pieces of thick cardstock:

Some of these are adventure specific, and therefore are not used in every game since you play one of many adventures included in the box. But a good amount of these are required, and punching them all out, then sorting them and getting ready for play took an hour at least. In addition to the above there are also two decks of cards that represent abilities, items, or contain monster statistics.

Here are all the miniatures that come with the game:

Lots of beasties! Again, you’ll only use a few of these each adventure, but it’s cool there is such a variety. You’ll note in the above and later photos that some of mine were a bit squished (look at the dragon in the photo above). If I wanted to straighten them I suppose I’d need a hairdryer…

I chose one of the beginner adventures: ‘Secrets of the Underdark’, which was for 2-5 characters. I chose three: Drizzt himself, as well as Catti-Brie the archer and Wulfgar the barbarian. Familiar names, if you’ve read the books. My adventure was a standard ‘dungeon crawl’ until I reached a particular spot in the Underdark which would trigger a battle with a random villian (chosen from the Drizzt novels baddie roster). If I defeated the villian, I would win. If any of my guys died, I would lose.

Gameplay consists of drawing random dungeon tiles and placing them onto the board, forming an increasingly larger playing surface as the game proceeds. When you draw tiles all sorts of things can occur, from revealing a monster (common) to setting off traps or finding items (less common). Any monsters on the board are hostile, and must be defeated before they kill you. The player controls his characters as well as the monsters, using specific commands on each monster card as a form of rudimentary monster AI.

Played proceeded smoothly for the first few rounds, with any monsters I revealed being 1-hit-wonder goblins. Then this guy turned up (the monster deck is random):

The little green guy is a goblin (who was ineffective by now; read the AI on his card) but the purple drider was bad news! A streak of apalling dice rolls led to the drider actually reducing Wulfgar the barbarian – my guy with the most health – to 0 hitpoints. He wasn’t dead yet, due to a ‘healing surge’, but the use of one of my (only!) two healing surgers was unexpected and unwelcome. The drider dead, I moved deeper into the dungeon…

Combat is fun. All resolutions are done with a single die, and there are many items and abilities and tactics that can be used. I tended to have it somewhat easy against the majority of foes since I focused 3 vs 1, but I imagine in a multiplayer game where everyone goes off on their own things would get hairy very quickly. In my case this didn’t happen until I revealed the ‘Drow Glyph’ dungeon tile, which triggered the endgame. Here’s what the board looked like when legendary assassin Artemis Entreri made his grand appearance with a cadre of drow combatants:

This was bad, bad news. Suddenly I was 3 vs 4, and one of those 4 (Artemis) had a sword that let him regenerate 25% of his health every successful attack! I focused on his lackeys and took them down mostly using Wulfgars berserker attack which hits multiple foes.

Here is the state of the board at this point from a longer angle. My one criticism of the game is the large amount of space needed to hold all the cards that are used. Although this wouldn’t have been as much an issue were I not soloing the adventure. You can see though if I had played 5 characters I wouldn’t have had the room.

In the end I defeated Artemis and won the adventure. It was hard fought though, since Artemis concentrated on Wulfgar and took him to 0 again quickly, requiring use of the final healing surge (and also a healing potion). Wulfgar fled after that, and led Drizzt and Catti-Brie finish Artemis off, which itself took many more turns than I would have expected due to the healing sword. But, a win is a win!

Overall a good game, and well worth the reasonable cost (I got it for about $35) I think. Now what about the third game they released…