It's an odd week for gamers around the world. Europe's got a whopping nothing and Australia might as well have, Japan has its usual flood of DS titles, including some highly anticipated titles, and here in the U.S., we've got an odd mix hitting shelves. Let's hope everyone can find something to keep them entertained!
Each day, between now and the 26th, we're going to look at a different piece of the DS Fanswag End of the Year giveaway as a reminder of exactly why you need to hightail it over there and enter -- but it's not fair that the Grand Prize should get all the love. Today, we're looking at another part of the second prize: WordJong. We found the PC port to be quite palatable, and it can be yours with minimal effort. Remember, you can enter once per day. And if you're having any trouble with the comments, check here for a handy walkthrough.
We can understand. The DS is the best invention since antiseptics, in our eyes, completely revolutionizing our life and bringing peace to the world. It's a device that could probably travel back in time, get into the ring with the great Muhammad Ali and knock him out in two rounds (the DS would spend the first round dancing circles around Ali, humiliating him before going in for the kill in the second round). The DS is our own personal super hero.
So, we can appreciate this mod that puts a touch-screen into a Game Boy Color. But, you may wonder how the controls actually work. See, different areas of the touch-screen are mapped to corresponding buttons, with a majority of the screen being assigned to the d-pad. It's not as exact to the DS, but it's close enough for us.
2007 is almost over, and the end of the year brings joyous tidings of List Season. It's the time for taking stock of the last 12 months of gaming, and trying to make sense of it by putting things in numerical order. Join DS Fanboy for our best-ofs, worst-ofs, and other categories-ofs.
Our favorite system has two screens, is controlled with a stick, and features extremely popular games about petting dogs and doing math. What we're saying is that it's not that surprising when something weird related to the DS comes along, because everything about the DS is weird.
But the things on this list are above and beyond the baseline DS weirdness. Nothing has made us go "hmm" this much since the Phil LaMarr-ious C&C Music Factory: Make My Video. Turns out, it was a banner year for crazy junk happening. Join us after the break as we look at some of the most bizarre DS stories of 2007.
We hate to disappoint you, but if you were desperately holding on to some insane hope that the blocky, sub-Final Fantasy VII look of Away's characters was somehow an artifact of a poor scan, these new direct-feed screens will disabuse you of that notion. The flat faces and blank, circular eyes continue to look really damn creepy, in character art and in gameplay.
Luckily, the game is Away: Shuffle Dungeon, and not Away: Hanging Out With 1996-Era Character Art. Meaning that the majority of your game time should be spent focusing on dungeon crawling, and not face-to-face chatting with the polygon-economical cast.
In fact, the actual dungeon part is 2D, character art and all. And it looks really nice. For some reason, Mistwalker and AQ Interactive have decided that the only time the characters should look embarrassingly ridiculous is when you're talking to them. Why didn't they just stick with 2D for the whole game?
A listing for Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice has surfaced at GameStop's online site, claiming the game would grace retail shelves on the 19th of February. Although the listing is hardly confirmed, we're crossing our fingers that this is the true release date.
We might have initially thought the game was coming too soon following Trials & Tribulations, but that isn't the case any longer. We want this game. And we want it now. Also, we wonder about possible pre-order gifts, although we won't be pre-ordering through Capcom directly, we assure you.
Posted Dec 17th 2007 10:30AM by Eric Caoili
Filed under: News
"Party in the city where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn"
Oh, Will Smith, if only we could believe you and your ridiculous ears. Slated for next February, Miami Nights: Singles in the City is the latest mobile-to-DS port from developer Gameloft (Asphalt Urban GT), advertising itself as a "social simulation game" in which you try to make it big in Magic City as a model, singer, or actor. To our surprise, the DS game's graphics actually look worse than the cellphone version, mostly due to the studio's move from 2D sprites to 3D figures.
Gameloft isn't the only company to blame for making Miami Nights less inviting -- Ubisoft, the title's publisher in both Europe and the states, also did its part to tone down the game's sex appeal, at least for the US. While Miami Nights' European cover features a blonde woman in a bikini, the North American boxart has the same model covered up, now in a low-cut dress.
Is Ubisoft worried about conservative parents revolting over the lubricious image were it to appear on game shelves, right in between Meteos: Disney Magic and My Horse & Me? Or maybe the publisher just doesn't think we're ready for that jelly? Shake your hips past the post break to see the original packaging art and an embedded video of Miami Sound Machine's "1-2-3."
You may know Neon Genesis Evangelion as a dense work with an inscrutable and debatable storyline built from religious, psychological, and philosophical themes. It's the giant robot anime with the completely nonsensical, abstract ending sequence. You may also know it as the source of a bunch of skeezy figurines and doujin comics. But Petit Eva is ... not those things.
Petit Eva: Evangelion @ School, is, in fact, a reimagining of Evangelion as a super-deformed high school comedy. The three Eva pilots are now students at the NERV school under principal Gendo Ikari, and have to contend with bullying from EVA-01. Yes, the robot.
Petit Eva is now being adapted into a DS game by Namco Bandai, and said game seems to be modeled after, of all things, Duck Amuck. It's a minigame collection in which events are triggered by interacting with various onscreen items. In the series of screens presented by Famitsu, Shinji and Asuka are fighting over some cake. We don't even think the cake represents unattainable happiness or anything. It's just yummy.
Some games really depend on story, like the Ace Attorney series or any number of text-based adventures. Sure, they may have other elements as well, but it's really the story that pulls you along (or doesn't, if that's not your thing). But how do you feel about stories in games in general? Are you the type who skates through story screens as quickly as possible, or do you watch and read everything closely, even if it's not necessarily important to the game?
Face it. If you've owned Final Fantasy IV for the SNES, the GBA, and plan on getting it for the DS, you're an FFIV addict. Of course, when we show you things like these miniature figurines, that just makes us enablers.
For $39.00, you can get your fix from NCXS. The figures in this Final Fantasy IV Trading Arts Mini collection are only 6cm tall, which means they're tiny. Of course, you might just want to save your money for the game instead.
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.
Shipped out to stores in Japan just last week, Fujimori Midori no Let's Tarot performs virtual tarot readings while teaching its users how to interpret the cards themselves. It's an interesting title, one that we could picture possibly being a small success if ever brought to the states, occupying the New Age shelves of bookstores.
Also interesting is who publisher Bitway chose to promote the fortunetelling trainer, opting for a celebrity face, Kanako Yanagihara, instead of Fujimori Midori, the medium who lent her name and likeness to the game. Read on for some of Kanako Yanagihara's previous work.
Each day, between now and the 26th, we're going to look at a different piece of the DS Fanswag End of the Year giveaway as a reminder of exactly why you need to hightail it over there and enter -- but it's not fair that the Grand Prize should get all the love. Today, we're looking at one of the crown jewels offered as part of the second prize: My French Coach. We dedicated an entire week to finding out just how awesome Ubisoft's French trainer was (so awesome), and now we're offering you a shot at it. Remember, you can enter once per day. And if you're having any trouble with the comments, check here for a handy walkthrough.
In Japan, Square Enix and Konami are battling (serenely) for domination of the DS yoga training game market. Konami has released their Doko Demo Yoga as Let's Yoga. But in the U.S., it's anybody's game. Literally -- any yoga game that comes out will be the best yoga game available. Ubisoft likes those odds.
A listing has appeared on GameStop.com for a game from Ubisoft called Quick Yoga Training, to be released on March 28th. They had better be quick about their yoga training if they want to make sure to beat Konami, who (we assume) will release Let's Yoga over here ... at some point. As for us, we don't care who we get our yoga training from, as long as it allows us to stretch our limbs several times their normal size, breathe fire, and teleport.
Being the jovial types that we are, there's nothing we enjoy more than a good, hearty belly laugh, and sometimes we struggle to contain our mirth while getting our DS on.
WarioWare: Touched! was perhaps the first title to really make us laugh out loud, and more recently Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and the Ace Attorney games have coaxed a titter or two from us. It's also worth noting that Kaboom Kaboom and Insecticide both look like they could contain a good few chuckles.
We can't be alone in this respect, so which DS games crack you up?
This trailer shows the good professor put on his puzzle-solving hat as he cracks the case in Professor Layton and the Devil's Box. Frankly, we don't care much about which puzzle the man is solving (some stuff with tiles and keys), but care a great deal as to where it's being solved. Like, right here in the United States. Where we live. So we can go buy the game.
It's an odd week for gamers around the world. Europe's got a whopping nothing and Australia might as well have, Japan has its usual flood of DS titles, including some highly anticipated titles, and here in the U.S., we've got an odd mix hitting shelves. Let's hope everyone can find something to keep them entertained!
We hate to disappoint you, but if you were desperately holding on to some insane hope that the blocky, sub-Final Fantasy VII look of Away's characters was somehow an artifact of a poor scan, these new direct-feed screens will disabuse you of that notion. The flat faces and blank, circular eyes continue to look really damn creepy, in character art and in gameplay.
A listing for Ace Attorney: Apollo Justice has surfaced at GameStop's online site, claiming the game would grace retail shelves on the 19th of February. Although the listing is hardly confirmed, we're crossing our fingers that this is the true release date.
You may know Neon Genesis Evangelion as a dense work with an inscrutable and debatable storyline built from religious, psychological, and philosophical themes. It's the giant robot anime with the completely nonsensical, abstract ending sequence. You may also know it as the source of a bunch of skeezy figurines and doujin comics. But Petit Eva is ... not those things.
Some games really depend on story, like the Ace Attorney series or any number of text-based adventures. Sure, they may have other elements as well, but it's really the story that pulls you along (or doesn't, if that's not your thing). But how do you feel about stories in games in general? Are you the type who skates through story screens as quickly as possible, or do you watch and read everything closely, even if it's not necessarily important to the game?
In Japan, Square Enix and Konami are battling (serenely) for domination of the DS yoga training game market. Konami has released their Doko Demo Yoga as Let's Yoga. But in the U.S., it's anybody's game. Literally -- any yoga game that comes out will be the best yoga game available. Ubisoft likes those odds.
Being the jovial types that we are, there's nothing we enjoy more than a good, hearty belly laugh, and sometimes we struggle to contain our mirth while getting our DS on.
